The Next Four Days
by Last of the Lilac Wine
Summary: Elijah agrees to help Clare Kennedy, a woman who is attempting to recover her memory of her past despite suffering from what the world views as hysterical amnesia. Meanwhile, new cop Seth Lakeman is forced to make a decision between what is moral and what is right to protect the people of Mystic Falls when it comes under siege by those sworn to kill vampires.
1. Mercy

**A/N** There won't be any author's notes accompanying the chapters after this one, so I'm writing a general message here that will apply to every succeeding chapter.

1. Firstly, and most importantly: Thank you so much to everyone that reviews this story - if you're a fellow fanfiction writer, you'll have a pretty good idea as to how much encouragement and motivation a review gives a writer.

2. As there will be [no] '**A/Ni**ng' in this story, I strongly recommend you sign in to leave a review. I will make sure to reply to any questions asked in a private message, but I will not be doing it as an extension to this story.

3. On my profile page there is a link for pictures of characters as I see them. I know some people like to form their own ideas of character appearance as they read, but if any of you are curious as to how I perceive them, just follow that link.

* * *

**A NOTE ON THE GENERAL CHRONOLOGY OF THIS STORY **

This story is told through the eyes of several different characters that reside in Mystic Falls - some are canon characters, others are my own original characters. The events they witness can cover hours or minutes or seconds and the sequencing of these events is not strictly chronological. One chapter may leave off at a certain time, and the next chapter may occur a few hours before its predecessor finished.

This all being said, I do not believe this makes the story difficult to follow; only structures it in a way that gives the reader a general idea of the plot from all angles and perspectives.

I hope you enjoy this fanfic and enjoy reading it as much as I am enjoying writing it.

- _Last Of The Lilac Wine . May 2013. _

* * *

**MERCY**

* * *

Elijah stepped out of the taxi smoothly. The driver, who seemed almost embarrassed that nobody at the hotel had waited out to welcome him, apologized professedly before peeling his yellow car off the curb and driving away.

For his part, Elijah was inclined to reserve all judgments. The hotel was small one and the only clerk seemed to be almost rushed off their feet; so if his features were set into that of faint disdain as he swept across the lobby of the hotel, it was because the scent of blood perfumed the air from a young waitress whose hand had been cut on the broken shards of a glass she'd dropped.

Though Elijah could boast of a higher tolerance to blood and the tedious human nature than that of his siblings, he had to admit he had his limits. And with that thought defining his personal boundaries, Elijah impatiently waved off the clerk that hurried to greet him before he could get too close and made his way into the (blessedly) empty elevator. The small space still felt claustrophobic with its stale air that carried the faint scent of humans, but at least it was empty.

The elevator walls were broken into different large mirrors, glowing now with the reflected gold of the over-head light and Elijah brushed at some imaginary dust on the sleeve of his suit (human contraptions were so tiresomely slow.)

The arranged appointment was to take place on the third floor, in room 64 at exactly noon. Something about the phone call the woman had given requesting he meet her there haunted Elijah: perhaps the inflection of deadened calm on her words as she spoke through the static of the phone, or perhaps it was the mystery of; if he's declined to visit, what might have happened to her next.

He was not so inclined as to heed every call of women that played the damsel in distress but then again what did he want? What did he expect if he continued to portray himself as a man with morals, or – more distinctively – a _vampire _with morals?

It was a cardinal sin in the eyes of his brother to still abide by the strict rules of a human society they'd left hundreds and hundred's of years ago. But just because they _were _monsters didn't mean they had to _act_ like them.

The elevator suddenly gave a slight shudder as it pulled to a halt on the second floor, doors sliding open with a metallic clang.

The gap was barely big enough for a person to fit through by the time a young women fell through it. She stumbled into the confined space of the elevator, her panicked gasps for air loud in the sudden silence.

Stunned, Elijah stared at her.

The woman's red hair was caught and held up from her face in a messy bun and there was a coating of crusted blood smeared from her collar bone, up one cheek to her hair line. She wore a simple black cocktail dress and when she reached out a hand to steady herself on his shoulder, he noted the few freckles that were scattered over her forearm.

Elijah had never felt anything like it; her touch more quiet than a breath. When his gaze fell onto the fingers that clutched the material of his suit, on the bloody hand she'd imprinted onto the shoulder and the red substance that was caked beneath her finger-nails he realized that the blood smelt strangely un-sweetened. It could only be that of a vampire's.

He frowned, his confusion heightening as he re-assessed the woman once again. "Whose blood is that?" he asked sharply.

She trembled, but did not reply.

"Look at me."

She did not raise her head, just released her grip on his arm and attempted to back away as much as was physically possible within the small space of the elevator. The doors had already slid shut, the elevator completely still as it waited for instructions and the woman was utterly trapped. When he lunged forward to grab her she was unable to dodge the movement and his fingers wrapped around her arm, tight as a tourniquet.

"Look at me," he repeated, preparing to stare into her eyes and force the truth out of her.

"No. Please, no," she begged - words finally torn from her throat as she attempted to tug her arm out of his grip. "Don't."

He ignored her. "Whose blood is that?" he repeated, forcing her to stare into his eyes.

"Get away from me."

Elijah frowned at her resistance to his compulsion. Her eyes were wide and so dark they were almost black with her fear. He scanned the creamy skin at the woman's throat and wrists for any kind of jewelry that might hold vervain, and, frustrated when his gaze yielded no answers, he wrapped his other arm round her back and drew her close enough that he could bury his face into her neck.

She cried out, struggling in earnest against his grip now, but she could not escape and Elijah could almost taste the sweetness of her flesh as adrenaline and horror rolled off of her in waves. He allowed his fangs to tentatively graze her shoulder where the strap of her dress had fallen to reveal white skin and his lips brushed against the tracery of brown and golden freckles he found there. His teeth broke her skin and hot blood welled up into his mouth like a burst dam. No vervain. No hint of the humming energy that might signify she was a witch. Totally human.

He released her.

She stumbled backwards slightly and he watched the blood – her own, this time – trickle from the bite mark he'd left down her skin.

"Not you too," she whispered, briefly touching the wound at her neck and holding her fingers out in front of her. Horror slowly touched upon her features as the blood dripped from her fingertips and onto the wooden flooring.

Elijah's face hardened at her obvious disgust and fear. "Unfortunately. Now, if you'd be so kind as to answer my question –"

But she seemed to be in some kind of a daze. A strange look crossed her face as she continued to watch her own blood drip from her finger tips – some kind of dark fascination - and along with the impatience that welled up in Elijah again he felt anger mixed with the beginnings of something like fear.

He was about to push for an answer again in that coldly calculated voice that masked all real emotion when she answered, pulling out from her reverie.

"Vampire." She said, suddenly. "I'm covered in vampire blood."

For the first time, there was silence in the elevator. Her erratic breathing had slowed and her dark eyes seemed somehow calmer following her confession. .

"You're a hunter," Elijah finally concluded.

Her skin flushed.

The light pink color worked its way up her neck and into her face and ears, the blood pulsing angrily in protest to his statement. "- A what? No – I –"

He stepped forwards, an irrational anger burning through his veins. "You hunt my kind down and kill us like dogs," he said, his eyes flashing with a kind of cold scorn. "You would have my family and I exterminated, destroyed -"

"For God's sake, let go of me!" the woman cried out and half terrified, half furious she pulled away abruptly. "_They're_ hunting _me_!"

At her words there was a crash as something hit the roof of the elevator hard. Reflex reaction, the woman braced her arms against the walls either side of her to steady herself as the whole cart shook. She stared up at the ceiling in horror as the whole space gave another shudder and the light bulb above their heads burst with a shower of bright white sparks.

Elijah could hear something moving about outside in the elevator shaft and felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise. He was almost certain that it was another vampire.

"What's your name," he demanded quickly of the woman in front of him.

"Clare Kennedy."

"Clare," he mused – the clipped tone of his British accent suddenly becoming more pronounced with surprise as he noticed the traditionally Irish last name. "Why are these people looking for you?"

There was a great groaning sound like bending metal and the pair glanced up once again.

"They're trying to get into the lift," Clare whispered in horror as a tile shifted slightly. "Oh my God."

She dived forwards to jam her fist against the button for the lobby but Elijah covered it with his hand. "What are you doing?" she snapped.

"Why do these vampires want you dead?"

"Stop it, they're going to kill me!" she panicked, attempting to move his hand in a bid to get the elevator back down to the ground floor once again.

"Why do they want you dead?"

"I don't know, I can't remember anything that happened to me before two days ago – I swear."

Composure broken for a moment, he blinked in surprise. "What?"

He paused, reminded of something – that fragment of words, he had them heard somewhere before. For a minute a phrase tried to take shape on his lips and then he managed to force out: "You're the woman on the phone."

Of course she was. But the change of emotion in her voice was such that he had barely recognized her – there was no dead calm to her voice here, only panic and confusion.

Clare's response was somewhat aggressive through her surprise. More strands of red hair fell loose from her bun as she spun round to face him. "_You're_ Elijah?"

He nodded and suddenly her expression seemed to soften, the stressed, tight lines on her face smoothing somewhat. "Please. You promised. On the phone you promised you'd help me."

His response was hissed between clenched teeth as the elevator gave another tremor. "Please," the woman repeated again as she grabbed onto his hand, unwittingly smearing blood onto his skin.

The elevator doors opened before he could respond and they were both suddenly facing the second floor of the hotel.

Stretching out before them was a deserted corridor with a carpet of deep red that was almost precisely the same shade as Clare's hair and white-wash walls and wooden doors.

"Get out here," Elijah instructed finally, some form of an idea quickly taking shape in his mind. "Keep walking until you get to some kind of stair case. Make for the roof or outside to an alley – you need to lure them out somewhere where no one will see us."

She didn't move. "On my own? Where are you going?"

"The next floor down," he replied, curtly – annoyed that the afternoon was not going the way he had intended and frustrated she was questioning him when there was precious little time. "I'll need to dispose of our friend in the elevator shaft."

She nodded. Inhibitions seemingly resolved Clare sucked in a deep breath and abruptly turned and fled down the corridor away from him.


	2. Amnesia

**AMNESIA**

* * *

Clare paused as she heard the elevator doors slide shut behind her. The corridor was quiet and she suddenly felt doubt creep up on her.

How did she know that this Elijah wasn't lying and simply abandoning her?

Her past experience with vampires proved them to be untrustworthy and dangerous – how did she know he would protect and save her? Was this a clever set-up by those following her and just a trap?

Clare's footsteps faltered further until she stumbled to a complete stop. She leant her body against the wall next to her and rested her head briefly against it too, suddenly very tired. She'd been running like this for two days now with barely any idea as to who she was beyond that of what her drivers license could tell her. No idea why she was being hunted down by a pack of blood thirsty vampires. No idea of…anything, really. Did she have a job? A family? She'd managed to mis-place her past so easily and she'd no idea as to how she'd done it.

Clare's body stiffened suddenly as her eyes fell on the glass box on the wall opposite.

The past two days had taught her to trust no one. She had no idea what her personality had been like before those two days, but now she was desperate, untrusting – she'd trained herself quickly in the art of self-preservation.

Clare bent down quickly and ripped off a strip from the bottom of the black cocktail dress she wore. The dress now fell dangerously short to just above mid-thigh, but she couldn't bring herself to care: the material of the dress was disgusting, anyway – covered in gore and blood and ruining it further couldn't hurt.

She wrapped the strip of cloth several times round her hand, ensuring it covered her knuckles properly before folding her fingers into a fist shape. She took a deep breath, glancing once again at the case before her before smashing her fist into it.

The glass shattered immediately upon contact, shards of it biting into her wrist and forearm but she was completely oblivious to the pain as she stared at the prize before her.

The glass case had held the basic fire safety tools – a hose, fire extinguisher and axe. Clare reached for the latter, swearing under her breath when her arms almost popped out of their sockets at its weight.

The axe's wicked broad, half moon blade on one side of the head and curved spike on the other made the weapon seem overly threatening and dangerous for something that was intended to save lives. Clare was hoping if it was made to hack through a door or wall to get to someone on the other side, then the axe would just as easily serve a purpose for swinging at some vengeful vampires.

She gingerly held the axe out before her again, pausing for a few more moments to inspect it before running on down the corridor, which was long, with many twists and corners. She counted almost forty doors as she ran.

For a while Clare panicked that the elevator was the only means of transportation to and from levels, but then she realized that was silly – in the event of a fire or black out all buildings this modern had some kind escape-route that didn't rely on electricity.

Rounding a final corner Clare reached what she'd been hoping to find – a stair well. It wasn't overly ornate – the hotel being a small town one – but the polished oak steps were clean, and she instantly felt self-conscious of the state she must be in.

She froze as she stepped out onto the landing of the stairs. She could hear voices of guests as they made their way up the steps, loud and cheerful and she could only imagine the response if they were to see her: covered in blood and wielding an axe - nobody would believe she wasn't anything but a crazy murderer. It ruled out any way of getting down to ground level and finding a deserted alley like Elijah had wanted so Clare turned and ran up the stairs in search of the roof.

The fact that her options had already been restricted made fear push through her veins even more potently as she climbed the steps in a hurried run. The thought that had always run through her mind these past two days every time she encountered vampires; _is this it, _beat like a pulse in her body. _Is this it? Is this it? _

Is this the time she wouldn't be smart enough, strong enough or careful enough? One mistake would be fatal, and she couldn't even be sure she trusted this Elijah's offer of help.

What if there were more vampires than she could handle this time? What if these vampires were stronger than the ones she'd faced before?

Clare could never actually remember committing the act of murdering a vampire – only her intentions to. _Amnesia_, she often thought.

Something had happened two days ago that had caused her to loose her entire memory of her whole pervious life, and then to black out at sporadic intervals.

The first thing she could ever remember of her existence was waking up on a forest floor, with leaves and twigs in her hair in the very same black cocktail dress she was wearing now.

To begin with she'd debated with finding a hospital to get her vitals checked, figure out what had happened to her, but then the vampires came and the timings between the blackouts began to close up. On the first day it had been once, by the time the second day had come around, black outs were barely an hour, sometimes minutes apart. The fact that her hold on _herself _was now wavering meant that Clare was terrified of anything and everything. A desperate person was the most dangerous kind, she knew. They'd try anything and do anything, and that was exactly what was happening to her.

She climbed more stairs. By this time her throat was burning, her lungs on fire. The oxygen she breathed seemed intent on scalding her airways. More stairs.

Clare kept on running until she got to a fire exit, her whole body crashing into the door as she pressed down on the bar and stumbled into a blissfully less public stair well.

She paused for a second. Up or down?

She'd originally intended to make for a deserted street on the ground – simply to get out of this damned hotel – but the ground would be more public. If Elijah _was _going to help her, the roof would be a more private battle ground. If she got out the hotel and onto a busy road it would be easier to steal a car and get away by herself…Fight or flight? How much did she want those following her gone? Her much longer did she want to run for? It had only been two days and Clare was already exhausted.

It all came down to whether or not she trusted that this man would help her, and something about _him_, something about his demeanor made her hesitate and glance _up _the stairs. If she made for the roof…if he didn't meet her there, she was as good as trapped. Would the vampires know she was up there? Were they following her now?

Slowly, Clare placed her foot on the step in front of her, then on the next one. Right foot, left foot. She was climbing up, her decision made: she would trust him. And what was she supposed to say to herself to justify that choice? _I'm afraid of being alone right now. I don't know anyone, I don't know who my family are, if I have a family. I need to understand where I fit into this world and what's happening to me._ And it went deeper: _I don't recognize myself. I don't even know who I am. _

She wanted safety. She wanted protection.

Clare's movements became more sure and faster with each passing step. This stair well was smaller than the last one. It ascended steeply and appeared so narrow it wasn't possible to go up it without scraping an elbow along a wall on either side. Both steps and walls were made of the same grey cement, the stairs twisting in a spiral shape as Clare climbed higher. The darkness was broken by a few dim light bulbs hanging by chords and her breath came out in sharp pants as she struggled to maintain her speed as she climbed.

The stairs stopped abruptly with the presence of the next fire exit door and Clare reached out and threw it open hurriedly.

There was rushed glimpse of a white-blue sky before something hit her hard and she was sent hurtling back down the steps she'd just climbed. _No_, Clare thought, but there weren't the words.

She fell on the sharp edges of steps, her finger-tips scrambling for purchase on _something _that would stop herself from continuing the fall.

She was dimly aware of the panic of not knowing where her axe was, the awareness that it was no longer in her grasp and the worry - was it anywhere near enough for her to land on? With that thought, Clare twisted, more desperate than even to stop her fall. Her hand found purchase on the step above her, the rest of her body curling up with the whiplash of her sudden halt.

Clare gasped as the pain hit her. She wasn't sure if she'd broken anything but her skin felt bruised, her whole body one bunched up muscle of pain.

A boot appeared in her vision and just as soon as she registered that fact she felt another blow to her abdomen. She cried out, tumbling down another two or three steps and this time when she stopped she crawled to her hands and knees and spat out blood.

She struggled to her feet, trying to make herself as small as possible as she came face to face with a blond haired vampire.

Tall, he seemed to fill the entirety of the small space of the stair well – his face contorted in an expression of utmost loathing.

The vampire's fist went through the wall just where Clare's head would have been had she not ducked under his arm quickly, sprinting back up the stairs and away from him. She didn't feel much pain, but that was simply because she might have gone too numb with the shock of it all.

The elastic which had held Clare's red hair in its bun had been removed during her fall and loose, the vampire now was able to fist his hand in it and jerk her back.

Clare felt the same hand close round her throat; her head collide with the wall, again and again. Stunned, she could do little more that freeze up under the creature's intense hate for her, unmoving like some kind of rag doll at his hands.

In her daze, she almost welcomed the idea of dying. While a primitive fear kept stirring in her, the pain of her body and the lost illusions of her life made her wish for some kind of a conclusion for this all to come as swiftly as possible.

The force of the next blow as the vampire rammed her head against the wall caused the lamp above their heads to swing to and fro, giving uneven flashes of light.

Clare could see shadowy grey as it swung away from her, then light as it swung back towards them, then a face of bared fangs and angry eyes, then blissful darkness again as the light swung away.

"You just won't die, will you?" The vampire sneered, and though her head was spinning, she managed to form a response.

"Never," she snarled – and spat a mixture of blood and saliva into his face.

Time seemed to pause. The lamp swung towards them wildly again, suddenly bathing Clare's face in light – her white skin and dark eyes shown in stark relief against the grey wall behind her – before it swung away again, plunging them both into sudden blackness.


	3. Treading Water

**TREADING WATER**

* * *

The next thing Clare knew she was panting heavily, hands braced on her knees as her body doubled over under the force of the heavy breaths leaving her body. She was standing on the roof and had no idea how she got there.

The roof was completely flat – above her head was a spider's web of a few cables and wires for the electricity and power of the building and to her right was a metal cylinder which she supposed was some kind of water cooling tower. Apart from that, the space around her was empty.

"Okay," she said aloud to herself. "Think."

But all she could register was the abrupt feeling of relief to be away from the claustrophobia of the stair well and in open air. A light breeze played with her hair and swept strands of it over her face. When she reached up to brush it out of her eyes she felt the slip of her own blood on her forehead.

"Christ," Clare whispered, examining the red substance on her fingers in horror. She felt a panic bubbling up inside of her and attempted to force it down. _Panic later_, she thought, _just figure out what the hell you're going to do now. _

Collecting herself, she checked the green-leather strapped watch on her wrist. The watch-face reflected the glare of the sun over-head for a moment, blinding her, before she could see the actual time. 4:06. She could barely have 'blacked out' between the vampire on the stairs and here for more than five minutes – the chances were she was still at the hotel, and this was the hotel roof. She remembered Elijah and his plan and instinctively cast around for people once again but, just the same as before, she found herself to be alone.

Clare chewed on her bottom lip for a moment before walking up to the edge to verify the hotel was definitely where she was. With both hands clutched warily on the lip of the roof she leant over the edge and glanced down. She had to be barely more than five stories up. There were a few cars driving along the road below her and a couple of charming, picture-esque small-town shops on the other side of the street. Beyond those shops was a wood and then houses and directly below her was a sign that said _Welcome to Mystic Falls, _and below that an indication that this building was, indeed, the town's only hotel.

Clare was pleased to find that she wasn't afraid of heights – something new to add to the few things she could now remember about herself - and was about to withdraw from the ledge when a voice rang out.

"You really do make it too easy."

She whipped round.

The woman standing before her had to be one of the most beautiful in the world with long shining hair, spring-green eyes that put Clare's dull, dark ones to shame and golden-tanned skin. She was also, of course, the cliché vampire – dressed all in black from head to toe.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Clare frowned before blushing. Right. Standing on a ledge. Large drop.

The woman ignored her. "Do you know how simple it was to find you?" she sneered. "You really don't cover your tracks very well: using the same credit card, dropping your real name every town you're in – if it weren't for your impressive number of victims I'd say you really were quite the amateur vampire hunter, Clare Kennedy."

"I'm not a vampire hunter," Clare snapped, mostly irritated at this knee-jerk assumption everyone seemed to make about her, but also hoping to keep the woman talking and oblivious as she edged forwards and away from the ledge. "Why do you all keep assuming that?"

"It doesn't matter. What matter's is that Klaus has put a pretty price out for the one who finds and kills the woman whose left a steady trail of vampire bodies across Virginia these past two days," another voice – male this time - spoke.

The owner of the voice appeared from behind the water cooling tower to stand by the woman, he too dressed all in black. He had to be around the same age as Clare – a little over thirty – with a shock of brown hair, scruff across his jaw line and flat grey eyes that lacked the emotional expression found in his voice. "Of course, it's all in his self defense – the bodies lead directly to Mystic Falls and no one wants someone like you that close to home." He paused and looked at her thoughtfully, his head cocking to the side. "I must admit I'm intrigued to know what this is all for, what you're doing here...it's a shame that price on your head is for dead, not alive." A tracery of black veins bloomed around his eyes and he bared his fangs in preparation for the kill.

"No," Clare begged, attempting to stall the pair. "You've got the wrong person. I haven't got anything planned – I swear – I don't even know what you're talking about."

"You're a terrible liar," the woman cackled.

"I'm not lying – please – I don't –" Clare tried to quell the growing hysteria that was settling in the pit of her stomach. She was going to die.

How could they possibly believe she was the person that had killed countless vampires when she could barely defend herself against the two of them?

"You can't seriously believe I'm a killer," she asked, incredulously. "Why would a human like me want to kill so many vampires?"

Doubt flickered across the woman's features and for the first time she glanced at the man, taking her queues from him.

"I don't pretend to understand how the mind's of Hunter's work, Miss Kennedy," dismissed the male vampire, unfazed by Clare's challenge. "Occasionally I think some of you don't even have a purpose or a motive behind your life-style choice: some human's just want to watch other's burn."

And like that, with a chilling certainty, Clare realized that both vampires thought that what they were doing was right, was justified. That by killing her, they would be saving themselves and their kind.

"You've got it all wrong!" She yelled as the wind on the roof top picked up. "I'm not the person you're looking for!"

"You've tried saying that before," the woman sneered. "And like before, we don't believe you." And with that, she lunged forwards.

Reflex reaction, Clare dived to the side, landing on the hard concrete floor. The woman barreled passed her, caught herself, and turned – a murderous frustration on her face that made Clare scoot backwards and away from her in a pointless attempt to put distance between them.

The female vampire grabbed her by the shoulders and threw her heavily against the cooling tower.

_What is it with vampires and throwing people? _Clare thought deliriously as the shock of contact exploded through her body and she dropped to the floor, and then, a little more coherently: _why me? _

She struggled to her feet, blood running out of her right ear and a strange high pitch _eeeeee_'ing noise ringing through her head. The sound reminded her of some useless fact – that that noise was the sound of her ear cells dying. That once it faded she would never hear at the frequency again.

One more thing she'd lose.

Why was it she remembered stuff like this and not the last thirty two years of her life?

"Impossible," snapped the male vampire, and Clare was suddenly aware of the shocked look on both his and the woman's face as they stood meters away. "No human has that kind of resilience."

Clare was inclined to disagree – the force at which her head had hit the cooling tower meant that she felt strangely light, like she'd just swallowed the solar system. "I guess I just don't want to die," she smirked, echoing the other vampire's words from when he had attacked her on the stair well.

The man stared at her with minute intensity, his eyes wracking across the skin of her face, as his features suddenly pulled into a snarl. "Survive this," he growled, and his form blurred momentarily as he ran towards her.

Clare had just enough time to glance about for an escape route, see that there wasn't one and slowly let the comprehension dawn on her that – most probably – this was the moment in which she was going to die, before the murder attempt was (once again) made against her life.

In a sudden rush of her senses and clarity in protestation against her death, Clare heard the hum of the air conditioners around her, fanning out the heat and the smells of shops and cafes and offices across the town. She could hear the rush of traffic, road-menders and their drills and the clacking of loose drains and manhole covers as cars drove over them. She hoped, in vain, for some moment of fulfillment – to remember who she was, and what her previous life had been like – but recalled nothing.

In essence, she felt as if she'd been alive for two days. Too shorter time to live, in some ways. In others too long.

The male vampire did not act as she would have expected when he reached her. Strong arms looped round her waist as she was pulled effortlessly into a kind of fireman's lift. Dazed, her mind could only race, thinking of everything and nothing as the man slowly climbed the rickety metal ladder up the side of the cooling tower.

What was he doing?

Clare's heart thundered against his back and she kept forgetting to breath. What was he doing? She thought again. What was going on?

She began cursing. She thought of the worst swear words she knew and hurled them at him. She kicked his stomach.

His grip did not relent.

The ladder stopped at the lip of the cooling tower.

They paused.

The insistent _eeeeeee_'ing in Clare's ears was beginning to fade, like the Swan Song and with its loss she could hear fully again. Hear her own pulse crashing in her ears.

She opened her mouth to demand what he was going to do when suddenly she felt herself falling backwards, the air driven from her chest.

The water sucked at Clare all at once as she dropped into the cooling tower. Claustrophobia gripped her along with an over-whelming sense of fear as she thrashed about in the water as if it were fire. It was deep enough that her feet could not touch the bottom and shallow enough that she could see the sun, runny and sickly-looking, shining above her head. The color filtered out by the water around her. She tried to swim, but found she couldn't – she didn't know how, and despite everything, this shocked her.

How did she not know how to swim?

The water filled her nose and mouth and Clare felt a scream burn its way up her throat. Her head broke the surface of the water and her terrified cry was released into open air before her head dipped back under the surface. God, she was so scared. She needed to get out of the water.

She needed to get out _now_.

She was so scared.

Her head broached the surface once again, and this time she was able to fully comprehend something besides the fear. She watched as the vampire pulled up the other ladder that went from the top of the cooling tower into the water a few feet away from her and Clare realized in horror that the smooth, cylindrical wall around her offered no purchase for her to climb onto. She wouldn't be able to get out, and not being able to swim, she wouldn't be able to last very long anyway. She was going to drown to death.

"No!" she screamed. "Help me – get me – me out of here – please – get me out!"

So scared. "Don't leave, get –" but her next plea was lost as she fell back under the water again. She could see pink swirling around her, and it would have been almost pretty in a way had she not realized it was the blood on her skin and clothes coming off in the liquid. There was the steel wall in front of her, and Clare beat her fist against it, bubbles erupting from around her at her sudden movements. She couldn't push through the metal though and a scream of frustration escaped her – utterly soundless as the water swallowed her cry whole.

She couldn't die. Not like this, not with this fear. It was too cruel.

Clare realized she was staring once again at the surface of the water, and through it, up to the sky. She tried to let some semblance of calm in, but the calm before death story was utter bullshit – there _was _no serenity in death. It was terrifying.

Suddenly, framed by the sky, a silhouette appeared. She squinted, feeling the burning of her lungs, and her chest beginning to convulse in protest against the lack of oxygen.

Was it Elijah? Was it someone who would save her? Or was it just one of the vampires, coming to gloat at her death?

She squinted again, and felt her heart race. That profile, the way they stood…she was sure…it had to be the man she'd met only – minutes? – earlier. The one who'd promised to help. It had to be Elijah.

The hideous watery world of blood and death suddenly did not seem the only reality, only a thin prison – one she could burst forth from at any moment. She felt alive, not ready to take the crap of some vampire who felt her death should come now because _he _said so. If Elijah would not save her, she'd burst up from the walls of water, kick, thrash and swallow it in her attempt to get towards the light.

And it was exactly what she did.

Choking on water, her head broke the surface for a third and final time.

There was air.

She could breath.

She looked up and saw the legs of her rescuer above her, clothed in dark suited pants – definitely Elijah, she thought, wryly – and craned her neck back until she could look into his face. She realized she was crying – whether in relief or still in fear, she did not know, but through the sobs she managed to swallow another pint of water.

Elijah sighed as he gazed down at her. She almost looked pathetic, with her hair plastered to her face in thick ropes of red, drops of water mingling with the tears on her cheeks; and yet the fear in her eyes suddenly forced him to realize the danger of the situation for her – despite how humorous her human short-comings seemed to him. "You can't swim?"

"No," she choked out, averting her gaze from his. "Please, get me out of here."

He'd dispatched of more than four vampires for this woman – the evidence of which was the blood that coated his hands from the wrist downwards – and yet he found himself reaching down to help her once again, his hand gripping onto the wrist of her outstretched arm as he was forced to lean precariously far over the edge of the cooling tower to pull her out.

She was completely unconscious by the time he settled her onto the cool concrete ground of the roof, and Elijah was certain that it attributed mainly to the profuse bleeding on the left side of her head.

He touched the edge of her dress neckline, and then her collar bone where water droplets had accumulated. She was not the beauty that he had come to expect of the women he encountered in his life – Katerina, Elena, Rebekah – but the deep red of her hair, the red of generations, and the light dusting of freckles across her skin made her look different, and set her apart from others. Someone, a husband, boyfriend – maybe at her age even a child or two – must be desperate to find her.

Eiljah touched his palm to her neck where bruises were already forming and was suddenly surprised when Clare's hand shot up from her side and grabbed his wrist. _She has the reflexes of a cougar…_ he snarled in his head, surprised and shocked. _No human has that kind of response speed. _

Her eyes opened, and for the first time he noted the unnatural darkness to them – the shade separating the black of her pupil and the black of her iris was barely there, both almost as dark as the other.

He knew this was the girl his brother was demanding the death of – he'd heard the speech the vampire had made earlier and had hung back, unsure of whether she really was the enemy or not – but as Clare glanced around wildly, blatantly terrified now, Elijah was almost certain there was more to the whole situation than he originally thought.

"Oh my God," Clare choked out, bolting upright into a sitting position. She was coughing, shaking hard and Elijah frowned.

"You're not drowning, you're safe now."

She began to cry.

"Clare," he said as he tugged slightly to free his hand of her grasp. She let him go. "You're safe. It was just water."

She ignored him and buried her face in her hands. She mumbled something, but even with Elijah's supernatural hearing, he couldn't make it out.

"What?" he asked, impatiently.

She lifted her head. "Am I ever going to be safe from those bloody vampires?"

He smiled as the slight Irish under-tones of her accent became more pronounced in her irritation. "I can hide you somewhere where they'll never think to look for you….in exchange – you tell me everything you can remember; everything that's happened to you to cause these vampires to search for you," he bargained.

She regarded him warily. "Where will you take me?"

"The lion's den...they will not think to look for you there. Now get up, there could be more coming." He looked away so she couldn't see his face. Once again, he was betraying his brother: Elijah was going to smuggle the very danger his brother had been obsessively worrying over into their house…right under his very nose.


	4. Good Cop, Bad Cop

**GOOD COP, BAD COP**

* * *

The cruiser was pulled up onto the curb of the main road running through Mystic Falls and Seth leant back against it with folded arms as he watched his partner, Ross, lay into some high school kid who thought they could gun their car up to eighty – in a forty mile an hour zone – and cut up the two cops as they proceeded to storm through the intersection on a red light.

When Ross and Seth had followed - siren's wailing - and got the kid to pull over, Seth had to remind himself that searching the boy's car wasn't necessary; he wasn't in LA running a drugs bust anymore. Mystic Falls was a small town, and most likely the kid would get off with a warning and had been speeding for kicks.

"I swear Ross, I wasn't going over fifty!" the boy implored.

_Small town. Everyone knows everyone_, Seth reminded himself. Of course you'd be on first-name basis with the local police officer. Totally normal.

Fuck, he missed the city.

"Ross, let's just take him back to the station…" Seth butted in, his voice laced with impatience.

"You wanna play big cop in a small town?" the kid turned to him, sneering. "Fuck off to model village –" and that was all he managed to get out before Seth slammed his head down on top of the Chevy with one hand and held his arm behind his back with the other, cuffing him.

"Hey man! Jesus – that hurts!"

"I'm bringing you back to the station on the grounds of insulting a police officer, endangering the public and speeding," snapped Seth, bringing his hand down between the kid's shoulder blades. "Do you understand me?"

"I can't believe this –" Seth pushed down harder onto his shoulder and he cried out.

"I said _do you understand me?_"

"Okay. Okay. Yes – I understand!"

"Good," Seth replied. "Now get in the back of the car."

The sun peeked out from behind a cloud over-head as if embarrassed and Seth gritted his jaw. Mystic Falls was a small town – the kind where, had he been living there longer than a week, people would probably honk when they recognized his car, the kind where, if you forgot your credit card at the grocery store the checkout girl would let you come back and pay for everything later. The small population of Mystic Falls were close-knit, so the new, outsider-cop bringing one of their own down to the police station, Seth supposed, was another count in the grand cosmic tally of why he and this town would not get on.

Ross grabbed his partner's shoulder as the kid skulked into the back of the cruiser. "What the hell are you playing at, man?"

"He was going over double the speed limit! Have you watched enough of _Law & Order _to know that that qualifies for some sort of punishment?!"

Ross didn't rise to the insult, just remained calm. He was a dark-haired man of forty with a mis-leadingly hard mouth and jaw that detracted from his pleasant and laid-back personality. Ross had a young family and was generally a nice guy, but his expression was one of slight disbelief as he gazed at Seth incredulously. "So give him a warning – there are greater evils out there than that kid, Seth."

Seth let out a hollow laugh, rubbing a hand over the 5 o' clock shadow on his jaw distractedly. "And there it is."

"What?!"

"This whole damn police force is so focused on dealing with the supernatural in the town that they can barely do their job when it comes to upholding the morals and law for the _people_ living in it. I'm not the one that needs to put things into perspective, here."

Ross stared at him for a moment – Seth knew that technique. He'd been in the force six years – since he was twenty two – and he knew you could ferret out information just by looking into the eyes. He wondered what Ross saw in his. Disappointment, probably. He knew he was already fighting the rapidly failing law system in this town – one that was crumbling underneath the very pressure it put upon itself.

Ross looked away and sighed. "For krissakes, you haven't seen the kind of destruction one vampire can cause yet. You'd understand if you did."

"I sure hope I would," Seth muttered as they both climbed back in the police car – teenage boy grumbling to himself in the back – and the air fraught with the tension of their conversation.

* * *

When they got back to the station, it was bustling with cops. Unusual, for a small town, but naturally the higher-than-normal supernatural occurrences in the area qualified for a higher-than-normal ratio of police officers to deal with them.

Today, however, the area seemed busier than normal and Seth had good enough instincts to know something was wrong.

Quickly, he worked up enough nerve to knock on Sheriff Forbes' office door. It swung open at his touch, and the blonde haired woman looked up from the piles of paper on her desk.

"Mr Lakeman," she said, a smile – albeit, a slightly forced one – spreading across her face. She looked stressed. "You think you've got the hang of things yet?"

Seth shrugged. "I'd hope so - it's been a week." When she raised an eyebrow, however, he caved. "It's…it's different."

He was careful with how he said it. In so many words, Liz Forbes had told him up-front that she didn't need another hot-headed young cop and the only reason he'd got the job was because he'd had experience in detective work back in LA. He didn't want to offend her.

Liz nodded. "It is. I know the whole…vampire issue might take some getting used to, but I'm sure you'll manage." There was silence, and Seth sighed, wrapping his knuckles against the glass pane of her door distractedly. "I heard you brought in Jack Cassidy for speeding."

_Nothing gets past her. _He cleared his throat. "I did."

She didn't look up from the paper's she was examining. "Since you've only been on duty a week, I won't count this against you – but he didn't need to be brought down to the station." Seth tensed slightly. He knew that, despite the Sheriff's absolution, he'd screwed up and was already starting with a strike against his name. "You could slap a small fine on him, bringing him back here wasn't necessary" Liz Forbes glanced up from her notes finally to look Seth in the eye. "You're under my command now, Officer, from here on – you play by my rules."

Seth pulled on the collar of his shirt. The damn thing was choking him. "Of course, Sheriff."

"Good. I understand you doubled as a detective when you were working in LA?"

He paused. "Well, yeah - hated it though. Spent more time in the office than I did actually finding the guy who committed the crime. Most of the leads I was given were dead-ends, anyway."

"Mmmm, that sounds about right."

Seth suddenly frowned, confused. "Why?"

Sheriff Forbes stood up and led him out of the cramped space of the office. "Walk with me," she said, as they weaved through computer stations. She had one hand on Seth's elbow, guiding him, and her grip was surprisingly strong – developed through years of work in the force. "I want to put you on a case we've only recently become aware of. We've got most of the officers working on it –"

"-that's why it's so busy here," he muttered, comprehension dawning on his face as he watched stressed Officers hurry past him.

"Right. We seem to have a young human woman who's been leaving a steady stream of vampire bodies across Virginia. The trail leads right to Mystic Falls. I want you to do a background check on her. I want to know all her dirty little secrets. I want to know what she's going to do before she does. I want to know who she is and what motivated her to go on this sudden killing spree. I want you to find her, and bring her back to the station for questioning as soon as possible."

"You sound worried that someone's going round killing the vampire's this town hates so much," Seth noted.

Something flashed in the Sheriff's eyes, but it was gone as quickly as it had appeared. "I don't care if this person's after vampire's or humans," she said, tightly. "If anyone's good enough to kill that many vampires in just two days, they're dangerous in my book." And at those words she stopped him in front of a wall will a large map of the state on. All across it were tiny red stickers – marking the locations of the vampire deaths, Seth deduced. He frowned slightly as Liz Forbes continued to look at him hopefully.

"This is the trail of victims she's left. What do this she wants? Why do you think she's doing this?"

His eyes never left the map. "Well…based on their behavior so far…I have absolutely no idea. If you've been able to track the kills so easily, though, I'd say either this is one sloppy vampire hunter who has no idea what they're doing, or they _want _to be found."

"Or both." Liz and Seth both turned to see the young woman who had spoken approach them. Her name was Meredith Fell – he could see that from the name badge pinned to her white doctor's coat – and her skin was a dark golden tan, her black hair pulled up into a pony-tail. She was obviously some kind of specialist called in to assist with the case, but doctors were the worst kind of specialists to call in. They let you know, with every syllable of every word, that in the time they're wasting with you patients were waiting, people were dying. Quite frankly, it pissed Seth off: they weren't the only people that saved lives, just the only ones to act holier-than-thou about it.

"How'd you figure that out?" he asked, crossing his arms.

The woman glanced at him as she came to stand between the two police officers. Her head barely brushed Seth's chin - who stood close to six foot three – and she reached out an arm and pointed demonstratively at the map, ignoring the belligerent tone to his voice. "This woman that you're following," she said. "If I didn't know any better, I'd say she had a severe case of schizophrenia – she's demonstrating all the correct symptoms for it. The constant running suggests feelings of persecution and paranoia; the social isolation, neglect in self-care and frequent trips that apparently lead nowhere…"

"So, what?" said Seth, dryly. "When we find her, we stick her in a psycho ward?"

He'd seen it before, the chicken-and-the-egg conundrum: was this woman killing because she was being hunted, or was she being hunted because she was killing?

Meredith Fell turned to him, a slight crease appearing between her eyes as she frowned. "What you do is you check if she's wearing a ring or not."

He stared. "For what? Is it some kind of cult thing that all vampire hunters wear?"

She shook her head. "Not quite. I've seen something like this happen before to a friend. The ring was supernatural and it caused him to have another personality..."

She looked away, falling silent.

"What happened to him?" he asked.

Liz Forbes looked tense at Seth's question.

"He…" but Meredith shook her head. "It doesn't matter. It wasn't pretty."

"And you think that's happened to this woman?"

"I don't know," she shrugged. "But it's the first idea we have, and it explains what's driving this strange behavior."

The three of them were silent for a moment as they took in the map before them once again.

_Vampires. Magic rings. It's all it ever comes back down to in this town,_ Seth thought, bitterly.

Suddenly, a young Officer approached with a file. Skinny, red-headed – he could barely have been out of school. "I've got the background you wanted on Clare Kennedy, Sheriff Forbes," he said, handing over the papers.

She took them quickly, flicking through everything with an efficiency born of years of practice. "She was an archeologist by profession," she said, half to herself, half to Meredith and Seth. "Was reported missing when she wasn't returning any of her family's calls two days ago. 31. Mother died about five years ago – but that was from unorganized knife crime in Chicago – nothing that would hint at a vampire attack."

"So basically – nothing that would cause her to have a massive vendetta against vampires," surmised Seth. "No close friends killed by one? No family relative turned?"

"No," said Liz, and looked as if she was about to say more, but Ross suddenly butted in, sticking his head round the corridor. "Err…Sheriff? There's been an incident at the hotel."

The way Ross said incident was enough to get Meredith, Liz and Seth's attention narrowed onto him as they all waited for an explanation.

"What's the situation?"

Ross grimaced, running a hand through his hair. "A couple of dead vampires and a fuck load of blood…" he hesitated. "I think she finally made it to Mystic Falls, Liz."


	5. Body Of Lies

**BODY OF LIES**.

* * *

Clare continued to regard Elijah warily. Though she trusted him, she did not trust this idea of hiding her with the very person who wanted her dead the most.

"Just think of it as a safe house," he said.

"Oh yes," she snapped. "Because the last few safe places I've been hiding were really God damn safe."

"You were careless and scared," dismissed Elijah. "This time you'll have me – you _will _be safe." He hesitated. "Do you trust me?"

She studied him momentarily with a scientist's fascination. She saw the sharp cheekbones of his face, the dark eyes and hair, and wondered what drew her to him. She stared at him point blank, trying to place it. A muscle in his jaw jumped as he waited for her answer, not wanting to push her – the mark of someone with manners. And then it hit Clare. _Grandeur. _That was the aura Elijah gave off – the ability to be comfortable with the world and stand above it with dignity. Grandeur was what Elijah had, what Clare did not have herself and now, what she would never forget.

Nobody else had bothered to help her. Yet he had come – this dignified, handsome, coldly refined man – and she'd pushed for his help with out hesitation or second thought. Surely for someone who was not thinking with reason and had no memory, who was going on gut instinct alone, the fact she had been drawn to _him _had to count for something.

Finally Clare cleared her throat. "I trust you," she said, letting the words drop carefully, like they'd be safer in her mouth.

Elijah nodded and straightened from his crouched position next to her. "Good. Can you stand up?"

She tried. "No," she gasped, as her head spun and the bruises that covered her body twinged. Frankly, she was surprised she hadn't broken anything and she slumped back onto the ground.

Elijah carefully looked into her dark eyes. They weren't a natural color and the unsettling feeling they gave him instantly had him wanting to look away, but he determinedly held her gaze. "I can heal you, if you'd like."

"Vampire's can do that?" she asked, her eyes narrowing in disbelief.

He nodded.

"How?"

"You drink my blood."

She scoffed, but then her face turned white when he raised an eyebrow. "You're serious?" she gasped - and there it was again, that Irish accent that conjured up images of rolling farmland and stormy grey seas. "Feck off, I'm not _drinking_ your _blood_."

"If you want to get out of here alive, Miss Kennedy, I suggest you do it," he snapped – though slightly distracted from surprise. He wasn't sure why the slightly rough edges to her – the swearing, the Irish brogue – surprised him so much. Maybe it was because, for a woman whose eyes seemed so unearthly, those qualities made her appear suddenly more human. Or maybe it was because her features were too…_classical_ for such rough-edged-ness (later, when he would picture Mystic Falls, he would picture the shade of Clare's hair – deep and rich. At that point, however, he did not realize home could be more of a person than a place.)

Eventually, she broke the silence by asking: "And…me drinking your blood…that's the – the – _only _way you can heal me?"

He didn't answer, knowing the more she stalled the more against the whole idea she'd be. He bit into his wrist - deep enough that blood welled up and dripped down his arm – and held it out to her. "Drink," he ordered.

She hesitated.

"Don't think about it," he said impatiently. "Just drink."

She glanced at him again before threading her fingers through his and bringing his out-stretched hand closer to her face. She licked her lips nervously as she felt her chest contract – finding it difficult to breathe.

"No," she choked out, her resolve failing.

"Just do it" his eyes burned at her and Clare shook her head again, desperately.

"I can't, I hardly…think it's necessary."

"You were going to say 'I hardly know you.'"

"Don't tell me what I'm thinking," she snapped, her eyes flashing. She made to push away his wrist but Elijah's fingers tightened around her own, holding his arm in front of her face insistently.

"I won't be able to help you unless you're healed, Clare."

"For God's sake – I can't!"

She'd shouted the last few words, and as the protest died there was a sudden silence. She breathed deeply, unwinding her fingers from his and scooting away from him slightly. She would not meet his gaze.

Elijah sighed, as a breeze fluttered across the roof top – rippling their hair and clothes.

He had no idea how many vampires were chasing Clare – more could show up at any moment and he wanted her as far away from the hotel as quickly as was possible. And from the looks of her head wounds, she would barely be able to stand, yet alone walk and he didn't feel like carrying a bloodied woman through a crowded hotel when the alternative was so much easier…or, at least, it should have been.

"I am the second born son of Esther and Mikael," he said – suddenly, smoothly and dispassionately. "My family traveled from England to America years ago, and post that I lived in Europe with my brother. I also spent a lot of time in Chicago and New York –"

"What are you doing?" Clare asked.

"You seem to think that you hardly know me," he shifted slightly – the place where he'd bit into his wrist was itching as it re-healed itself and he adjusted the cuff of his suit. "Such wariness is understandable, but it's a barrier if I'm to help. Now – must I continue to spill out my life's history or are you going to let me heal you?"

"I have a horrible feeling I'm going to regret this," Clare sighed, before leaning forwards and once again grabbing his wrist. Elijah was shocked by the gentle strength of her grip and the warm rush of blood at her fingertips. "Are you, err," she glanced at him and gestured to his wrist, "…going to re-bite it for me?"

He knelt down in front of her and once again sunk his fangs into his skin and - once again - there was the familiar sting and then warmth as blood flowed from the wound.

Clare did not hesitate this time as she lowered her lips to his wrist. He felt the brush and swirl of her tongue and his free hand, unbidden, moved to the small of her back to support her as she leaned forwards a little more.

Elijah knew that, generally, humans did not like the taste of blood and – contraire to popular belief – did not find it erotic to drink it in any way, shape or form. Which was why he was incredibly surprised when something like a moan sounded from Clare's throat, though her breathing was so ragged and harsh that it was barely comprehensible. She twisted, on her knees now and he was forced to loop a hand round her waist to stop her from falling forwards on top of him as she pressed closer in sheer excitement.

Elijah knew she was taking too much blood, but the very sight of her desire captivated him – the way her hips twitched and another moan was torn from her throat as she drank.

He felt her other hand, frantic, on the muscle of his shoulder as his blood pooled in her mouth, then under his jacket, on his shirt, then on the bare skin of his chest as her hand snuck underneath the material.

Something stirred inside of Elijah and he pulled away from her quickly. He struggled to be indifferent as he watched the obvious currents of desire and excitement pulsate through the human woman in front of him. She was still very young (in his eyes) though she had to be almost thirty. Unsure. She seemed to be equal parts frightened and embracive of this strange passion that couldn't be – _wasn't _normal – as she panted harshly.

Something wasn't right. Though Clare was wounded, he'd seen the way the male vampire had thrown her against the water cooling tower – at the very least, she should have been knocked unconscious. Then there were the fast reflexes, the heightened…responsiveness to situations like these (he couldn't help but notice the flush at her throat and cheeks, the scent of arousal that washed off of her in waves), the fact that he couldn't compel her and the way her memory seemed to have just…vanished. It was all almost definitely supernatural and he would have thought she was had she not possessed distinctly human traits – the swearing, the irrational fear of water and ridiculous stubbornness.

Elijah was sure it must be some spell of the witches causing it all, and he was determined to find out what was going on.

The wounds on Clare's skin were visibly healing and her hand flew to her throat as she gasped for air. "Is that…normal? To be like…_that_," she panted out, not meeting his gaze.

"Some vampires normally tend to have the reaction you just had…" he deflected as he held a hand out to help her to her feet.

She met his gaze. Glared up at him. "I meant for a _human_."

"Then…no," he stared at her intently for a second. "Do you remember anything from your previous life? Have you changed at all in the past two days?"

She took his hand and he pulled her to her feel effortlessly. "What are you after like?" she grumbled, still looking flushed and hyper-aware of every movement he made. "A list?"

He raised an eyebrow and she sighed. "I've already told you, I don't remember anything."

"You can't remember meeting anyone? Doing anything?"

"No – okay!" she snapped. "My whole life's just _gone_. I don't know if I have a family, where I lived, if I had a job. I don't remember a _thing_ – so can we just go…wherever it is that you're taking me so I can just go to sleep and forget that some ruddy vampire just tried to murder me…again!" She threw her hands into the air and stormed past him.

Elijah turned to look at her, taking in the tremor of her voice and the hope she had in him to keep her safe. This woman that he knew nothing about, this woman who knew nothing about _him_, who trusted him implicitly with her life.

He followed her off the roof and down some stairs, knowing that she could feel him one step behind her the whole way.


	6. Devil May Care

**DEVIL MAY CARE**

* * *

Seth and Meredith hurried out of the police station.

The wind had picked up, blowing hair into both their eyes as they ran across the parking lot tarmac. Seth watched in confusion as Meredith led him to her car, unlocking the door and jumping into the driver's seat.

"Aren't you coming with us?" he yelled over the wind, nodding back to the station where a few officers were being briefed on the situation: apparently a hotel guest had found the vampires' bodies up on the roof and protocol meant that the hotel had to be emptied before the fuzz arrived to secure the area and check out the scene.

"No!" Meredith said, shaking her head as she fastened her seat belt. A small smile grew across her face as she spoke: "You're coming with me. I've done this before."

Seth narrowed his eyes at her in suspicion before climbing into the passenger seat – Sheriff Forbes was going to kill him, but he figured as the prime detective on Clare Kennedy's case, he got special treatment.

Meredith twisted the keys in the ignition and reversed the car.

"We need to get there first," she explained, checking her mirrors before twisting the wheel and driving out of the lot and onto the busy road. "Normally when the police get to supernatural killings like these they mess up all the evidence which means people like you and me can't figure out what _actually _happened."

"So you're in on this whole vampire thing as well?" Seth asked, pulling some amateur Sherlock questioning on her. He was having a hard time seeing the positive intentions to all this – how did a simple doctor know so much about vampires and killings like these?

"Its Mystic Falls worst kept secret, isn't it?" the dark haired woman replied carefully, not looking at him under the pretense of checking her mirrors.

"Or best."

She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. "How'd you figure that out?"

"I've read up on this town," he replied, bluntly. "They burnt a house full of vampires to the ground, killed a couple of them in broad daylight and there's been more vampires killing humans here than in any other town in America – all with out the locals even coming close to figuring out what they're living with."

"And you don't agree with that," Meredith guessed.

"You have the right to defend yourself, don't you?" shrugged Seth. "You should at least know what you're defending yourself _against_."

The pair fell silent as Meredith pulled up opposite Mystic Fall's only hotel and they both jumped out of the car, slamming doors behind them and running across the road.

It was busy – guests flooding out with looks of confusion and fear on their faces. They both had to shove their way through the crowd to get to the hotel manager who stood at the hotel doors.

He was in his fifties, larger and heavier than Seth had originally thought him to be from a distance and at the sight of Seth in his uniform and Meredith in her doctor's coat caused his face to light up considerably. When the manager extended a hand in welcome, Seth noticed that there was a light coating of sweat on the man's forehead.

"Glad you're finally here, Officer –"

"Lakeman," Seth filled in as he shook the man's hand firmly. The manager then turned to Meredith, grasping her hand too.

"Doctor Fell," she introduced herself, glancing at Seth after a while when the man started to ramble on – "it'll destroy business for the hotel this will…and to think one of the _guests _found the bodies…I don't know what we'll do…"

Seth cleared his throat. "Mr –"

"Staker."

He nodded. "We're going to need to see the crime scene as soon as possible - ?"

"Right, right," the manager said quickly. "The roof – you'll need to take the elevator up to the top floor and then the fire exit and go up the stairs."

Seth nodded and strode through the large glass double doors and into the hotel with out another look behind him. Meredith frowned after him and turned to the manager, an apologetic smile on her face. "Thank you very much Mr Staker, we're going to do everything in our power to find out how this happened," she politely said, and hurried after Seth who was already standing in the elevator, the doors closing. She ran and slid her hand between the gap to prevent the doors from shutting on her and glared at him.

"What do you think your doing?"

"Going up to the roof," he said with feigned nonchalance.

"Okay, let me rephrase –" Meredith said, with forced calm. "What are you doing going to the roof _with out me_?"

"I need someone to stay down here and check the CCTV tapes."

"You want the _qualified doctor _to stay down here and look at grainy video footage whilst you go and check out wounded bodies? Are you crazy? You're a cop, you're supposed to be used to having a partner!" she accused.

"And as a cop I'm also trained to be naturally suspicious of people," he pointed out.

"What's that supposed to mean?" she asked, automatically defensive.

"That I think you're going to compromise the evidence," he suggested, truthfully. Meredith stared.

"What?"

"For a town that's supposed to be involved in a war against vampires both you _and _Sheriff Forbes seem damn worried about someone going around killing them," he explained. "Now, what am I supposed to think when you parade around with in-depth knowledge on magic rings and vampires' minds – only that you've dealt with them numerous times before – and it's not a stretch to think it's personally and on a friendly basis if you're so worried about someone killing them. A quick talk with Liz and I find out your using vampire blood to heal your patients. Like I said – there are dead vampires up there and plenty of blood: I don't want you compromising the evidence."

Meredith gaped at him before blinking rapidly. "You really think I'd do that?"

"You're wearing your white doctor's coat on your day off," he shrugged. "Which means you've just come from work –" he spoke over Meredith's protests. "Which _means _you've got to be pretty obsessed and invested in your job if you were working on your day off before you got called to the station. So, yes…I think you'd do that."

"I'm coming up there with you Mr Lakeman," Meredith said, angrily, and stepped into the elevator before he could say not to. "And you're not going to stop me."

He scowled at her and punched the button for the top floor. The doors slid shut and they both blinked in surprise.

It was pitch black.

"What happened to the lights?" Seth asked a loud over the creaking and groaning of the elevator as it made its ascent, his irritation momentarily forgotten. The atmosphere was slightly ominous, even if Meredith wasn't going to admit that in front of the cop who stood a little to her right.

"Push the button for the first floor," she suggested.

He did so – with out argument, which slightly surprised her – and a circle with a tiny number 1 in the middle lit up before their eyes as Seth pressed it; their only source of light apart from the glowing number 5 a little below that.

She could hear her own breathing in the tiny space, mingled with his own as they both waited, tense, for the doors to open and let some light in.

Meredith watched in amusement as Seth attempted to relax – something that obviously didn't come easy to him – by leaning one shoulder against the wall of the elevator. She could just make out his silhouette as he turned to face her.

"You aren't worried that someone's watching close enough to figure out that your patients are recovering too fast?" he asked, his voice sounding interested.

Truthfully, it _had _worried her when she had started working in the small town – but then Meredith had realized that brutal truth which had made her relax; and that she now voiced to Seth. "Nobody is ever watching too closely…apart from you, apparently," she amended, wryly. "It's Mystic Falls. Nobody cares about Mystic Falls."

"That's depressing."

"It's true," she murmured, and then winced as the elevator doors grated open and the light from the corridor in front of them flooded in. She used her hand to shield her eyes for a moment, squinting slightly.

"Hey, look at this."

She glanced at Seth and noticed him looking up to the ceiling of the elevator, she followed his eyes – noting the busted light bulb, and for a moment that was all she thought he was showing her, but then she looked up higher and saw the loose tile above their heads. She moved to stand by him, tilting her head slightly.

"What –"

"Someone was trying to get in - or out - of this elevator," he said, frowning.

"Do you think it was recently?"

"Probably – or else someone would have noticed and fixed it by now…hey, what are you doing?"

Meredith was stripping her white doctor's coat off, revealing a white blouse, blue jeans and plain, black boots. Seth was struck by how much younger she looked with out the coat marking her out as someone who was almost at the top of the medical field.

"I'm not going to be able to lift _you _through that gap, am I?" she explained. "C'mon, give me a hand."

"You think there's something up there?"

"Why else would I be going up?" she asked, impatiently.

A smile tugged at the corner of Seth's mouth and he rolled his eyes. "Okay, fine."

He folded his fingers together, making them into some kind of step for her to use.

Meredith tried to ignore the way her hand brushed the front of his uniform, how close her body was to his as she placed her foot on his hands, pushed off the ground with her other leg for momentum and was lifted up so she could fit through the gap where the tile should have been and grab on to the roof of the cart.

Meredith was surprised for a moment that Seth seemed to be able to support her weight so easily before remembering how she'd looked at him as they drove over to the hotel. The hard muscle that showed when he'd tensed at her questions.

She tried not to blush at the thought and shook herself mentally as she crawled through the gap, up onto the top of the elevator (both of them privately glad she wasn't wearing a skirt.)

"What do you see?" Seth yelled up to her.

But it was entirely black again. She couldn't see a thing. "Nothing!" she cried back. "It's too dark!"

She trembled, keeping her body as close to the roof of the elevator as possible – the air in the shaft was freezing and there was no light.

"Here!" said Seth, and he threw a small flashlight up through the space in the ceiling. Meredith's hand shot out and she grabbed it quickly, flicking the switch so that a beam of light appeared.

"What the –" she murmured, frowning. The light had suddenly thrown dents all over the roof into stark relief, it looked as if someone had literally tried to claw their way through the metal. She let her fingers trail over the harsh dips and twists for a second, thinking. It scared her slightly that she and Seth had traveled up here in something that looked so fragile and unstable now.

"What is it?" he shouted up to her.

"I don't know! It looks like something was trying to get into the elevator" she cried back.

There was silence, then: "You think it was a vampire?"

"Probably – I don't see how anything else could have inflicted this kind of dama-" she broke off, feeling something wet on the back of her neck. With the hand that wasn't clutching the flashlight Meredith reached behind her and rubbed at the substance on her skin absentmindedly.

When she brought her hand back in front of her face, though, she almost cried out. There was blood on her fingers.

She twisted round and shone the flashlight up above her head, up higher into the darkness of the elevator shaft.

For a moment all Meredith could see were the cables used to hall the cart up and down before she saw something caught in them. A body. So red with blood and twisted that she could barely distinguish its form.

"Oh God!" she cried out, scrambling backwards as another drop of blood dripped down. "Oh my God!"

"Meredith?!"

"There's a dead body up here –" she gasped. Her heart was thundering in her chest, her lungs almost collapsing with the force with which she was gasping in air with. She couldn't stop herself from continuing to shine the flashlight up at it, unable to stop herself from registering certain things: like the fact that the body was male, or that there was a hole in its chest where the heart should have been.

"What?" came Seth's voice, stunned.

"There's a body! _There's a dead body in the elevator shaft_ – Jesus Christ!" she willed the tears away. Trying to remain professional.

"Hang on - I'm coming up!"

She turned and let the flashlight fall back to shine onto the dented and bruised roof of the elevator cart. The body fell back into darkness, but she still knew it was up there now, even if she couldn't see it. The hairs on the back of her neck rose.

Taking a deep breath, Meredith reached down through the gap below her, taking Seth's hand and helping him to pull himself up to crouch next to her.

"Where is it?" he whispered. She pointed up above their heads, and he frowned, taking the flashlight gently from her hands and shining it upwards, as she had done before. "Holy –" he broke off as the body was once again illuminated, in all its twisted and horrific glory.

"Who do you think did it?" Meredith asked, shaking slightly.

"Professor Plum with the revolver in the library."

She turned to face him, punching him in the shoulder. "This isn't funny!"

Seth turned somber instantly. "I know. I'm sorry." He stood, careful to balance his weight on top of the cart and squinted up at the body. He seemed less effected than Meredith had been – though still visibly troubled by the sight. Perhaps it was because as a doctor, it was programmed into her to have more compassion for the victims she saw, or perhaps it was because Seth; trained to be professional probably even during a gang fight war zone in the streets of LA, had seen much worse than this single mutilated body. "It would have to have been another vampire that did this," he said to her. "I don't think a human could manage to kill a vampire, in an elevator shaft, and inflict this kind of damage."

"But that doesn't make any sense," Meredith pointed out, calming slightly as she looked to him, drawing her eyes away from the body. "Why would a vampire kill one of its own?"

"Right," agreed Seth. He chewed on his thumbnail for a second. "Who's the vampire that killed _this _one and why weren't they getting a long?"

They were both silent for a second as they contemplated the question before he glanced at her. "Let's go. We're not getting anywhere here and there are still the bodies on the roof."

Meredith nodded, and he handed her the flashlight, lowering himself back down through the gap and into the elevator. She jumped down after him and Seth caught and steadied her.

Suddenly their faces were close together, their breathing mingled and she couldn't but trace her eyes over the scruffy, slightly unshaven jaw line, the grey eyes and brown-blond hair.

"You're staring," he noted, still with his hands on her hips.

Meredith instantly jerked her gaze away and stepped back and out of his grip. "Sorry," she muttered, blushing.

When things were normal eyeing a guy up whilst doing her job was something she'd never have done – she was always too focused to notice anything else around her. And yet _normal_ was so far away, it had been so long since things were normal, that she couldn't even remember what it was like.

Fully aware that Seth was regarding her with a carefully blank expression on his face, Meredith glanced up at the ceiling – at the busted light and loose tile – and sighed. "I guess we're not taking the elevator up to the roof anymore. Come on – let's go find some stairs."

They walked down the corridor in silence for a while, Meredith with her eyes determinedly on the gaudy carpet underneath her feet and not on the tall cop beside her.

"We've been lucky," Seth said, suddenly – quite possibly the last thing Meredith expected him to say about _this _case.

She glanced up at him in surprise. "How come?"

"There's CCTV in this place –" he gestured up to a camera situated in a crook in the ceiling. "Even if these killing's show us nothing, hopefully we've got video evidence of the vampire that's helping her."

She hadn't thought of that. "You think this vampire's _helping _Clare Kennedy? What kind of vampire would do that?"

"The kind that doesn't see any way out," Seth suggested. "Maybe she backed them into a corner – threatened them."

"I don't see a five foot-something_ human_ woman being that threatening to a vampire – especially when all her kills seem to be sloppy…unplanned."

Suddenly, Seth stopped in his tracks. Blinked. Then he grabbed Meredith by the shoulders, looking down at her in amazement. "You are so fucking _brilliant_!" he exclaimed.

"I'm not going to argue with that, but what did I say?" she asked, raising an eyebrow.

"No _human _could be this careless and still be alive," Seth's eyes were shining with excitement. "No _human _could win over the help of a vampire when they're killing their own kind anyway – because this woman _isn't _human."

"I hate to shoot this theory down" Meredith said, frowning. "But Clare Kennedy isn't from a bloodline of witches _or _werewolves - I checked. And she most definitely isn't a vampire. She's just lucky."

Seth shook his head. "That's not the point. You never knew that vampires were real until you met one. Same goes for witches, werewolves: you never know these things exist until they appear."

"So…"

"So what if Clare Kennedy's none of the above?"

Meredith froze – finally understanding. "Nobody's proved this before," she said, slowly. "Nothing supernatural exists besides witches, vampires and werewolves."

"It does now," said Seth.


	7. The Pursued And The Pursuing

**THE PURSUED AND THE PURSUING**

* * *

"So," asked Seth, as they climbed the first flight of stairs leading up to the roof. "Where do you get all this vampire blood from then?"

"Crime scenes, like this one" Meredith replied. "They call in a specialist and it's easy to take a bit of blood under the pretense of analyzing it." She caught the look on his face and glared. "Hey, didn't I _just _promise you I wasn't going to do that here? Trust me."

Seth shook his head, laughing slightly. "I don't trust anyone in this town."

"That's because you don't know anyone yet."

"I know enough to know you all have god damn ulterior motives for everything,' he said, turning and facing her from a few steps above. Meredith noticed that his hand had drifted to rest on the gun strapped at his waist, something he seemed to do a lot when angry.

"Hey, I know I use vampire blood in my treatments – if I didn't, a lot of my patients who are alive right now would be dead. I do it because I believe that it's _right_. As someone who stands for the law and justice, I thought you'd understand that."

A muscle jumped in Seth's jaw.

Meredith knew he was the kind of guy who could get an idea into his into head, and that was that – you would barely be able to budge him. As a police officer, he would have been trained to see things in black and white, and Meredith wanted to show him that that mind set shouldn't – _didn't _– apply well in Mystic Falls.

She hesitated. "_Do _you understand that? That sometimes, being on the side of the vampires is okay?"

"Sides?" Seth scoffed. "There are sides? Why can't they just tell the public this crap? Sure there'll be mass panic, but most people have already figured it out anyway. They're in our movies and books as weird sparkly things for fuck's sake."

"I was trying to make a point, Mr Lakeman," Meredith said, rolling her eyes as she recommenced walking and climbed up the stairs, passing him.

"Oh, I'm sorry, go on," he said – his voice half sincere, half mocking as he started after her.

"No, I'm not telling you now!"

"No, c'mon!" he protested, laughing.

"You clearly already have your mind made up."

"That doesn't mean –"

"Oh." Meredith had thrown open the fire exit door to the roof – and sprawled out over it, like stars in a constellation, were two, very dead, vampires. In each was a large gaping hole at the chest and a tracery of black veins across their skin.

Seth gripped Meredith's shoulder. "You okay?"

"Yeah…you?"

"Yeah," he ran a tired hand down his face as he regarded the two bodies. "What a day."

She looked up at him and sighed. "I know. Come on, we better check them out – your friends at the police force should be arriving soon."

_Make sure you don't forget anything_, she told herself. _You only get to do this once. _

She approached, crouching down in front of the nearest body – a female. When Meredith reached out to touch her, though, Seth grabbed her hand quickly.

"What –"

"In a few minutes there are going to be crime techs here photographing evidence and a pathologist checking out this body. The last thing we want is your DNA all over it."

She nodded, understanding, and sat back on her heels. A little way off, the missing heart was lying on the concrete floor. She tried not to look at that.

"This vampire that's helping Clare Kennedy," Meredith spoke after a while, with a tiny frown, "had a very distinctive way of killing. Each time, with out fail, they've ripped the heart out.'

"Isn't that a bit messy?"

"Actually, it's very clean and efficient…for a vampire."

Seth winced, before his expression cleared to confusion. "Kennedy didn't kill any of these vampires."

"Right. Do you reckon she was even here?"

"That's why I asked you to stay downstairs and look at the CCTV footage," he said, pointedly.

"Would you know half the stuff about vampire killings if I wasn't here?" she argued.

"I wouldn't be left wondering how you knew the most efficient ways of killing a vampire if you weren't here."

Meredith snapped. "I thought you were trying to investigate this case, not _me_."

"Alright, jeez – _have _you killed a vampire though?"

"You're unbelievable."

"I just want to know!"

Meredith gritted her teeth. She liked Seth. Honestly, she did. He was smart, opinionated and frustratingly right most of the time. There were just some really, really obvious trust issues there.

"Yes," she said, finally – deciding that being frank would be the best way to reassure him.

She was a doctor, and he thought of the irony in that: _first, do no harm. _But then Seth saw the expression on her face and he nodded slowly.

"Okay," he said quietly. "Okay."

"No more questions now?"

"No more questions."

She blew out a breath. "Thank you."

They were about to move on to examine the next body when the fire exit door opened. They both whirled round, expecting a furious Liz Forbes, but it was only the portly hotel manager.

"We've found more bodies," he said, panting, sweating and uncharacteristically straight-forward. "In the room she was staying in."

"Take us there," Seth ordered, straightening from his crouch. Mr Staker took one look at the bodies on the ground and shuddered visibly.

"This way," he said, hoarsely.

Seth gave Meredith his hand to pull her up and together they followed the older man back down the stairs.

"So you two are the first wave of response?" he asked, as he jogged down the stairs.

"You could say that."

The man was quiet for a second before he spoke again. "In all my years…never thought I'd see anything like this. This is a nice town, you know? Peaceful."

Seth snorted and Meredith elbowed him in the side.

"_You want to tell me what's so funny about any of this_?" she hissed, under her breath.

Seth glanced at Meredith, then down at the hotel manager, who probably wouldn't get any decent business for years. "Absolutely nothing," he said.

He had a job – he was a cop, and a damn good one at that. But he suddenly realized then that Meredith had a _calling_. She cared. She was compassionate. Whilst he hated Mystic Falls, she would do anything to try and care for it and the people in it.

As two fairly straight-forward people, with a strong sense of right and wrong, Seth had figured they were the same. He saw now they couldn't have been more different.

"Listen, I'm sorry," he whispered, as the manager continued talking. Guiding them down the stairs to the third floor.

"No you're not," Meredith whispered back with a small smile. "But it's okay – everyone's entitled to their opinions, right?"

They were now being led down a corridor to room 64. Mr Staker took what was presumably a master key out of his jacket pocket and unlocked the door. His face was hued green.

"In there," he said, and Seth didn't miss how he stepped back to let them enter first, unwilling to even go in.

"You can wait out here, we'll be done soon enough," he reassured the older man, who looked suddenly relieved.

The worst thing Seth had ever seen was when he had been called out to an attempted suicide. The guy had tried to jump off of a six story building and had somehow managed to survive the fall. Barely.

That was no longer the worst thing he had ever seen.

Strewn out, across room 64, were the body parts of maybe five or six different vampires; and these killings definitely weren't carried out by the clean, efficient person Meredith had described on the roof.

Hell, the blood was sprayed up the _walls_.

They both stood for a second, shocked and over whelmed by the sheer level of violence before Meredith spoke quietly. "I think we found Clare Kennedy's victims."

Seth wiped at his mouth, trying to quell the bile that was rising in his throat. "I think we have."

Meredith nudged the axe lying at her feet. "I also think we found the murder weapon." Her eyes traveled further across the room until she saw a man lying twisted and maimed on the ground – the only body to not have prominent black veins trailing across their skin. "She killed a human," she breathed.

Seth followed her gaze. "This woman's insane."

"What would you normally do at this point?"

"You said that the kills on roof were very distinctive, so if we were to figure out who the vampire was that did it and find _them_, we'd probably find Clare Kennedy. You'd have to bring in a specialist, though…and I don't know many guys who specialize in vampires' killing techniques."

Despite the circumstances, Meredith suddenly grinned. "_You _don't, but I think I do." She looked once more at the bodies before continuing a more subdued tone. "We can't do much more here, c'mon."

Seth followed her out of the room, back out onto the corridor to where the manager was standing – face still ashen.

"Aren't you going to start performing autopsy's…or whatever it is you people do?"

"Has the Sheriff arrived yet?" Seth deflected.

The man shrugged. "I don't know."

"Go find out."

He turned to Meredith. "Who's this contact? Kennedy's already got a head start on us, and we need to catch up."

Meredith shook her head. "Damon Salvatore. If you want to know anything about how a vampire kills, you need to talk to him."

"Sounds like a nice guy," said Seth, dryly.

"What now?" asked Meredith as Seth set off back down the corridor. She had to almost jog to keep up with his much longer strides.

"The rest of the fuzz are going to be here by now – along with the reporters. We need to go see Sheriff Forbes. Tell her what's going on."

Meredith grabbed his arm. "What about the vampire bodies? People are going to suspect they're not human when they see them."

He smiled thinly. "Isn't what this town's best at – covering things up?"

"Don't be like that."

"What do you want me to say? I don't know what they're going to tell the public Meredith – I don't have the answers, my job is to _find _them."

She let go of his arm, and they both hurried on. It was clear that the police force had arrived – medics and poliemen hurried past them as they made their way down the stairs and across the lobby.

As they made their way to the large, glass double doors, Seth spotted her.

"Sheriff Forbes!" he yelled out.

"Officer Lakeman," the blonde haired woman finished her conversation with her deputy and turned. "Who gave you and Miss Fell the authorization to come here before I'd de-briefed everyone?"

Seth ignored her. "There's a vampire helping her, Liz."

"What?!" There was some yelling, and the three of them glanced up and through the glass doors to where the media were being held back by a string of policeman.

"She killed a human too," interjected Meredith, bringing the other's attention away from the bustling crowd. "Sheriff, this woman's dangerous – you've _got _to tell the public."

"We can't," Liz Forbes said. "Too much couldn't be explained with out bringing all the supernatural elements into it."

Seth shook his head, jaw clenched and Meredith touched his arm briefly. As if that would be enough to reassure him. "What do we do now," he asked, finally.

"Put on a show to get rid of the cameras, then find Kennedy before she can hurt anyone else – vampire or human."

They nodded, and with that Sheriff Forbes threw open the double glass doors, Seth and Meredith close behind her. The minute she walked outside, the media attached themselves to her, their questions stinging like bees. _How many victims? What are the names of the dead? Who did this? _

The Sheriff spoke up, and they quietened. "We can't disclose anything yet before the bodies are identified. There's an investigation pending and we promise to give you details as soon as we can. Officer Lakeman is our detective who will be taking charge of finding the killer and bringing him or her to justice – he will be helped by Dr. Meredith Fell."

"Why did the killer do this?" someone shouted.

Liz Forbes pressed her mouth into a firm line. "Thank you very much for your patience," she said. Not an answer at all.

Seth squeezed his eyes shut as Meredith guided him away from the crowd of people who demanded answers that would never be given. People who had no idea what they were up against.

It was sick.

"Listen, Seth," Meredith said, as they reached her car and climbed in. "I'm going to phone Damon now – we can stop this before anyone else gets hurt."

"Do it," he gritted out.

He watched as she sighed and stuck the keys in the ignition, starting the car. "Ring Damon Salvatore," she instructed to the voice recognition.

The man picked up on almost the last dial tone.

"Damon, it's Meredith –"

"Ah Dr. Watson, I _just _saw you on the news with Sherlock at the hotel," came a mocking, patronizing voice. "I'm guessing you need my expertise on your case."

"Damon this is serious," snapped Meredith.

"I know, I know, it's just so much _fun_."

"We need you to come in and identify some bodies for us."

"Ah. No can do. My hands are pretty full up with our newly turned Elena," said Damon, not sounding at all apologetic. "So as much as I'd love to…"

"Dammit, Damon, I wasn't asking."

"So rude," he said. There was a beeping sound and Meredith turned to Seth in disbelief.

"Did he just hang up?"


	8. Memory

**MEMORY**

* * *

He gave her his jacket.

Clare could not remember the last time somebody who knew her did something kind for her – in fact, in the past two days, kindness has been virtually none-existent. The past two days, she's lived off of the kindness of strangers – the girl at the minimart who gave her her coke free with the burger when she realized she couldn't pay with the meager amount of coins she'd found in her pocket; the man who'd picked her up when she'd attempted to hitchhike the fifty miles to the next town: because some, inexplicable, invisible force was pulling her towards Mystic Falls.

Elijah's suit jacket was, of course, several sizes too big. But that seemed to fit the objective just fine, as it covered the entirety of her tattered, blood stained black cocktail dress from inquisitive eyes as they made their way down several stair-cases and into the hotel lobby.

Elijah waited patiently as Clare ducked into the toilets near the guest lounge – carefully checking it was empty before she filled a sink with warm water and proceeded to wash off the majority of the blood on her face and arms.

She tried her hardest not to glance up to her own reflection in the mirror, because she knew that if she did, she would hardly recognize herself.

Not that she knew who she was in the first place.

But eventually her eyes flickered upwards and she stared openly at her own reflection in a kind of horrified amazement. She could not believe how exhausted she seemed, trembling almost, as if she hadn't slept in a long time. Her eyes, the most unsettling shade she'd ever seen, stared out of the mirror back at her and suddenly Clare felt the tears come. Spilling across her face like hot mercury and burning their way down her skin.

After everything that had happened, it seemed trivial that the thing that pushed her over the edge was how awful she looked, but she couldn't help it. Just braced her arms over the sink, bowing her head so she wouldn't have to look in the mirror again.

After a while the tears ran dry, stray drops of it running down Clare's face to the hollow of her shoulder blades. She pulled fistfuls of tissues from the dispenser, patting the watered-down blood and tears on her skin dry and flushing the blood-stained evidence down a toilet.

When she rushed back out into the lobby, Elijah was there waiting for her. He was the picture of calm as he pressed a hand to the small of her back and guided her out, through the double doors, and onto the sidewalk of the busy street outside.

"We need a car," Clare said, collecting herself as she tried to think logically. She had to speak loudly over the noise of the wind and the sound of people talking and struggled to keep up with Elijah's longer strides as he set off down the street. He didn't look at her as he replied; only kept his gaze straight ahead.

"Yes."

"Well aren't we –"

"You need new clothes first," he replied, smoothly, turning to look at her. She flinched under his gaze, hoping that her cheeks weren't red or blotchy from crying. "Other vampire's might not wait for an explanation like I did if they smell that much blood on you."

"Oh." Was her brilliant reply. She glanced around her, taking in the little café's and book shops, the green park across the road.

"What are you humming?"

"What?" she asked, catching herself and twisting her head back to stare up at him.

"You were humming Chopin."

"Well if you knew what I was singing, why did you ask?" she asked, wryly, yet inwardly surprised. She'd been singing something under her breath?

"I suppose the better question would have been _why_ are you singing," he conceded, before glancing at her with open interest. "Do you think it's a memory?"

Clare looked down at her hands, her heart beat thundering in her ears. Was her memory coming back?

"I didn't even realize I was humming…isn't Chopin a pianist…composer…person?"

"Yes."

"Could you repeat what I was singing?" she asked, eagerly. "Maybe it'll jog my memory."

"I don't sing," Elijah said flatly.

She smiled – amused and faintly apologetic. "I didn't realize, I'm sorry."

He gestured with his hand to wave off the apology and her smile grew. "Listen, there's a music shop _right there _– maybe we could –"

"We don't have time."

"But this could be important!"

"I didn't sign up to help you rediscover your memory," he said, curtly. "I'm just trying to keep you safe so I can figure out who did this to you."

"Aren't those both the same thing, though? If I get my memory back, I'll be able to remember what happened to me," Clare pointed out. Elijah let out a frustrated sigh as the woman's insistence, pinching the bridge of his nose with a thumb and finger. "Look, just give me your phone," she said, suddenly.

He looked at her suspiciously. "Why?"

She huffed in irritation, slipping her hand into his pants pocket to withdraw a fancy black smart-phone. Quickly, she loaded up Chopin's music on the internet, hunching over the phone as she listened for the right piece.

"Why would I be humming a piano composition…" she wondered to herself out loud as Elijah hovered next to her, looking torn between impatience and unwilling interest. "I don't _think _I played piano…"

Suddenly she leaned forwards as the first few bars of another piece sounded. "This is it," she said, excitedly, "this is what I was singing, wasn't it?" Elijah nodded mutely, taking in the way the eagerness left her eyes as the song continued, a frown creasing her forehead as she listened, and a shadow flittering across her face as quickly and silently as a bird. Elijah watched as Clare's eyes darkened and a shiver visibly worked its way through her.

She paused the music abruptly and thrust the phone back into his hands as if it were a poisoness creature. "I don't know at what point I heard that in my past," she murmured, quietly. "But that isn't a good memory. I know it's not."

And with that she brushed by him, face drawn and worried. Elijah glanced down at the phone, at the title of the piece: _Nocturne, Op.55 No.1_

Like Clare, he wondered where she could have possibly heard it before, and why it had triggered such a negative reaction.

* * *

"I keep hearing it," she whispered, breaking her silence abruptly. "That piece of music in my head – over and over. It's going to drive me insane."

She had been very quiet when they'd made their way to a shop, bought her fresh clothes and dumped her old ones in the garbage of a deserted alley. Now, as they sat in a taxi, she broke that silence, turning to Elijah with troubled eyes. A steady rain was pattering against the taxi windows and every now and then the compelled driver would tap out a random rhythm on the wheel with a finger as they sat in a queue of traffic.

What she'd picked out to wear at the shop wasn't extravagant. A plain blue sweater, faded jeans and sneakers - the dark colors meant that, when Elijah looked at her, she almost completely blended into the dark corner of her side of the taxi.

He wasn't sure whether she was serious about the insanity part or whether she was just using it as an expression to convey her irritation – either way, the comment made him slightly wary.

"You'll be fine," he said, though he wasn't sure whether he was saying it to assure himself or her.

Clare nodded, running a hand through her red hair distractedly. "Yeah," she echoed to herself. "I'll be fine."

It was after six o clock, the world beginning to soften at the edges and she was starting to relax now that she knew she wasn't going to get attacked out of the blue by a group of vampires.

The taxi was cold. She still had Elijah's jacket shrugged round her shoulders for warmth and she stared out the window at narrow rainy streets as they made their way to this 'safe house' that Elijah was talking about – the one in which that man who wanted her dead lived.

"Which one is it?" Clare asked, as she stared out at the pretty Victorian buildings with their white picket fences. She heard the crunch of gravel underneath the taxi's wheels and Elijah pulled on her elbow so that she was leaning over his lap to see out the window on his side of the car.

"This one," he said, and Clare's eyes widened.

The house before her eyes was huge, with ivy growing up the west side and large, imposing windows and doors.

"Jesus, does this guy come from some serious old money, or what?" she murmured.

Elijah laughed as if she'd made a joke. "All vampires come from old money," he reminded her and helped her out of the car, dismissing the driver.

They walked up the slate path - Clare shrinking back slightly - to the front door – which, she was surprised to see, wasn't opened by a maid or a butler, as she had half expected it to be, but by a good-looking, blonde haired man.

"Klaus," Elijah greeted. Clare stiffened.

"Ah, brother!" the blonde haired man said, grinning at Elijah before turning his eyes on Clare - no recognition flashing in their depths as he regarded the red-headed woman. She breathed a sigh of relief. "You brought a pet!"

Clare's head turned to Elijah so fast, she thought she'd got whiplash. Adrenaline pushed through her veins and she felt her chest clench.

"_Brother_," she whispered, her eyes burning with accusation as she stared at Elijah. A muscle in his jaw jumped as he attempted to avoid her gaze. "You're his _brother_?!"


	9. The Enemy You Know

**THE ENEMY YOU KNOW**

* * *

Clare felt panic rise in her chest. It was some kind of trap. It had to be.

Because why else would he bring her here, if not to hand her over to his brother?

Elijah didn't answer her question. He didn't move a fraction of an inch, but somehow every pour in his body radiated tension.

Klaus turned to her. "I love it when people do this, it makes me feel famous," he said with a smirk. "I assume you, darling, have heard of me?"

Her gazed flicked to Elijah once again, then back to the face of his brother, Klaus. Nothing in their physical appearance marked them as siblings. "Only recently," she all but whispered.

Something in his face tightened. "Do you mean me any harm?"

She paused. Tried to figure out the best answer when the man before her had sent out countless numbers of vampires to kill her before she could reach him. And yet here she was, on his doorstep, barely inches away.

Clare lifted her chin slightly and tried to say that right thing. But it was so, so hard to convince him. "No."

"You better not be lying to me," he said, in a silkily dangerous tone.

"I'm…not."

He sighed. "You're not doing the best job of convincing me here, love, so I'll cut to the chase." His lean arm shot out and his hand gripped her throat in a way that was light enough that she wouldn't choke, and hard enough to be an unspoken threat. His eyes fixed on hers in much the same way Elijah's had done in the elevator that morning. "Do you mean me any harm?"

Out of the corner of Clare's eye she thought she saw the one side of of Elijah's mouth quirk upwards – as if he'd just made a particularly brilliant move in a hard game of chess. "…I don't mean you any harm," Clare repeated, uncertainly. It was enough for Klaus, however, and he released his grip on her neck with a look of satisfaction.

"Lovely, you two can come in then." He winked at Elijah as he assured Clare through the door. "That one's a keeper, brother. I'd be careful with her or else I might try to take a bite, too."

"You know I don't share, Klaus," Elijah deflected smoothly, leading Clare away from him, up some stairs and into the privacy of his bedroom.

Once there, Clare's fury came so fast that she forgot to hide it away. She didn't have any time to marvel at the huge, old house, or the beautiful room that they were stood in; the moment the door closed behind Elijah, the tension and worry she'd been feeling simply exploded out of her.

"Why is it so _fucking _hard to be around vampires," she yelled, stomping into the middle of the room.

Elijah blinked at her sudden outrage, then raised his eyebrows and said with a kind of dark humor: "try being one."

She ignored him, whipping round quickly. In her anger her eyes seemed now pitch black, contrasting starkly with the fire of her hair. "He's your _brother_! You expect me to believe your betraying your own _brother_? How do I know this isn't some massive trap?"

"If I wanted you dead I would have left you to drown." He said, calmly, and watched as her face blanched at the memory and continued. "As it is, I didn't, and as it is your still alive. I have no intentions of giving you up to my brother so if you'd kindly control you temper-"

"No way!" she snapped. "I'm _angry_ goddammit. I woke up three days ago with no idea who I was or where I came from. In that much time I've had vampires coming after me with orders to kill me that came from a guy that is now LITERALLY LIVING DOWN STAIRS!"

Her Irish accent was now so thick in her anger Elijah could only understand one in every three words that she was saying. The more angry she became, the exact opposite seemed to happen to him. He was utterly calm as he let Clare rant all her rage out of her system.

By the time she had hurled her last question at him, chest heaving with exertion and face flushed with anger he had already poured himself a glass of scotch and settled himself into a chair at the corner of the room.

"And what the_ hell_ is with this thing that you all do when you grab me and look into my eyes really hard?!"

"Compulsion," Elijah replied, inspecting his glass nonchalantly as he tilted it in and out of the low lighting cast by a lamp at the side of the room.

"What?"

"Mind control. Though it doesn't seem to affect you."

Clare ran a hand through her hair, and then down her tired face before flopping down to sit at the bottom of his bed. "Do you have any idea why that is?"

"The reason I'm keeping you around is to find out," he said curtly, and then: "What are you doing?"

Whilst he'd been speaking Clare had been shedding her sneakers and sweater, and though she was still wearing a tank top underneath, he wasn't going to let her get any further. Memories of her arousal on the roof hours before flashed back to him, and his eyes narrowed like a hawk. There wasn't the same darkness to her eyes her now, in fact she looked completely normal as she raised an eyebrow at him. "This isn't the Victorian age anymore, Elijah, I'm trusting you not to jump me at the show of a little skin. I'm tired. I just want to go to bed and forget today happened."

He nodded slowly. Took another mouthful of scotch.

She crawled to the top of the bed, lifted the sheets and slipped under them, rolling to face away from him. "Maybe if I get some rest," she murmured, her voice filling the room, "I'll remember everything when I wake up."

"How many times have you wished that?"

She paused. The tears came to her eyes and she was glad he couldn't see them.

It was a useless, pointless wish, anyway - she would never regain the memories of her past life – but she hoped for it all the same. "Too many times," she whispered, already feeling the pillow underneath her face becoming damp. "I wished that."

She fell asleep quick after that, and for a long time Elijah sat in the corner of the room merely regarding her as she slept and forming plans in his mind – not realizing that those plans would be useless. Everything would be shattered by morning.

* * *

**DAY 2**

* * *

"There's a woman in the garden," Damon remarked.

Stefan walked down stairs, casually buttoning up the front of his shirt. He'd taken a newly turned Elena hunting that night, she was still rejecting human blood and he was not in the mood for Damon's games, so when he heard his brother utter that sentence, he could not have cared less.

"What?"

Damon, who was stood by one of their large windows, sunlight seeping through to illuminate the large room, turned to face him. "In the garden, there is a girl, brother."

His voice sounded typically sarcastic, but there was no lie on his face so Stefan walked over.

He half thought Damon had been lying but sure enough, there was a woman standing outside. Pale, red-headed and covered in blood.

"Why haven't you done something about her?"

"Oh yeah, go outside and say shoo? She's harmless, Stef, she's just been staring at the house for the past hour. In fact, I'm 99.9% sure that she's human. I can hear her heart beat from here."

Stefan pinched the bridge of his nose. "Harmless? There's blood all over her – she's killed someone, Damon!"

"I just want to see what she does – okay?" Damon shot back, raising his hands in mock surrender. Then he winked. "Isn't the suspense killing you?"

Stefan glared. "No."

Damon wrinkled his nose in disgust, fully turning away from the window now to look him in the eye. "Where's your sense of _fun _Stefan. If she tries anything, I'll kill her, kay?"

His words did nothing to reassure Stefan, and he was going to say so when Damon turned to face the window once again. "Hey, where'd she go?!"

Stefan turned to look as well. The garden was empty. "I thought you said she was human!" he accused.

"She had a heart beat!" Damon snapped, looking perplexed. His phone rang and Stefan had just enough time to catch Klaus's name on the caller ID before Damon answered.

"You better be able to explain this," was Damon's greeting

With his vampire hearing, Stefan could make out every word of Klaus's reply.

'_Ah, I'm guessing you've had problems with our new red-headed vampire slayer too?'_ he answered, smoothly.

"Why, what problems have _you _been having?" Damon asked. Stefan watched as his brother's brow furrowed.

'_Put it this way. It's a good thing the girl didn't know Elijah and I were Original vampires or we'd both be dead right now.'_

"And what a shame that would be," Damon snarked.

Stefan rolled his eyes and took the phone from Damon.

"What happened?" he asked.

'Elijah brought her into the house. I assumed she was just a pet, but then she staked both of us in her sleep. Oh and another thing, compulsion won't work on her – so don't even bother trying.'

"So, she's wearing vervain. Not unusual in this town," Stefan deflected.

'_Funny thing is though, my brother checked. She wasn't wearing vervain.' _

He had Stefan's full attention now. "What's going on? Who is she?"

'We have no idea. But she's a threat to us and to you, which makes us unwilling allies right now.'

Stefan paused, the line filled with static as he considered this new turn in events. Finally, warily, the words dropped from his mouth, cementing this new, uneasy alliance. "What do you want us to do?"

'Kill her on sight.'Klaus said, bluntly and hung up.

Stefan turned to Damon. "What the hell do we do now?" he asked, frustrated.

For once, Damon did not shoot back a sarcastic remark - instead, he looked deep in thought. A muscle jumped a long the side of his jaw before he replied: "You stay here with Elena, there's someone I need to see."

* * *

Being woken up at 8AM with a phone call from the notorious Damon Salvatore meant that Seth wasn't exactly starting his day-off on the best foot.

"_What_?" he snapped down the phone, irritably.

"Yeah, I think we need to talk now," came Damon's slightly arrogant sounding voice down the phone. "Meet me for a drink at the Mystic Grill in ten minutes."

Seth checked his alarm. "You want to meet for a drink at 8 in the morning?" he groaned. "Why?"

"Because there's a vampire serial-killer on the loose and I think it's in both of our interests to find her. Your pay-checks on the line and, well, my life's on the line…so are you coming for this drink or what?"

"This is a really shit idea," Seth moaned, rolling off of his bed and stumbling towards the closest pair of jeans that lay on his floor. "Couldn't this have waited until later?"

"I run a tight ship," Damon quipped. Seth rolled his eyes and removed the phone from his ear, pressing _End Call _as he did so.

He couldn't believe he was about to do this.

* * *

Seth got to the Mystic Grill a half our late – just to piss the vampire off. There were a few people scattered around the room inside; tucking into breakfasts and chatting happily but Damon was easily spottable – he was the only person at the bar.

Seth slid into the seat next to him and ordered a beer.

"You're late," said Damon, downing the remnants of his scotch and indicating to the bartender for a new one. He didn't look at Seth and Seth didn't look at him, but out of the corner of his eye he could make out an onyx-black haired man in a leather jacket.

"Totally intentionally, I assure you," said Seth, rolling his eyes.

Damon raised his eyebrows at the quip. "Shocker. I'm guessing you're the I-hate-vampire's type."

"Well you've all fucked up law enforcement round here, that's for sure," Seth said, dryly, and when Damon looked away from his drink to him he elaborated. "The police force is a bitch. It's totally crippled from vampires – I've never seen anything like it."

"Did I mention I'm good, _good _friends with Liz Forbes?"

"Already getting some blackmail to use against me?"

"Yup. _Man_, the Sheriff's going to be mad when she hears how little faith you have in her police force."

"Not as mad as when she hears one of her 'good' friends is a vampire." Seth shot back.

"Haha," Damon deadpanned sarcastically. "Nice try. But, she already knows."

Seth's jaw dropped. "You're kidding."

"No – and before you go around thinking that your precious police force is corrupt. It's not. Believe it or not but I'm one of the _good _guys."

Seth dropped his head into his hands, already exhausted. "This town's insane," he muttered.

"Suck it up," Damon said, giving him a fake-friendly clap on the back. "It's probably gonna get a hell of a lot worse before this is all through."

Seth had to acquiesce that that was probably true. "Okay...what do you want to know," he said heavily.

"What we're dealing with," shrugged Damon. "How much do you know about this?"

"Not much," Seth admitted. "Her name's Clare Kennedy – she was reported missing by her family about three/four days ago. She's been leading a steady trail of vampire bodies across Virginia – but its sloppy work, easily followed and barely concealed." He stopped talking momentarily to take a pull from his beer, and then stalled, watching how the glass rim shone in the light, tipping the bottle this way and that experimentally. "Meredith had some ideas…" he spoke slowly, just as Damon was about to get irritated and push him for more details. "…about schizophrenia and magic rings…"

Almost like a breath of air, a name passed through Damon's lips. "_Ric_." His brow furrowed for a moment as an onslaught of memories hit him.

"What?" asked Seth, not hearing properly.

Damon waved a hand. "Nothing. I saw the woman this morning anyway…there was no ring on her hand."

"And she didn't attack you?"

"Do I look dead to you?"

Seth shot him a look. "You get my point," Damon snapped, giving him a withering glare.

The human smirked and returned to his line of thought. "Well anyway, like I said – Meredith only had a theory. We all have a lot of theories."

"And you?"

The corner of his mouth quirked into a humorless smile. "You're going to think I'm crazy."

"We pretty much make our living off of crazy," Damon noted, rolling his eyes.

Seth couldn't argue with that. "I don't think this woman's human," he said, bluntly.

"So we're dealing with a werewolf?"

"I didn't say that. I don't think she's anything you guys have ever dealt with before. I think this is some new…supernatural…thing."

Damon looked at him for a second. "You're right, you're crazy," he said, draining his third glass of scotch and moving to stand up.

Seth grabbed his arm, restraining him. "Wait, hear me out."

"Why should I?" Damon snarled, irritable.

Seth's phone vibrated in his pocket and he withdrew it, frowning at the screen that was lit up with a new text.

He slid the lock, and did a double-take.

**Meredith Fell: **_Clare Kennedy just handed herself in to the police station this morning. Get down here ASAP. _

"Because," he said, his voice slow with shock. "We just found her."

The look on Damon's face was priceless


	10. What You Don't Know Can Hurt You

**WHAT YOU DON'T KNOW CAN HURT YOU**

* * *

When Elijah awoke, he was already furious. He knew instinctively what the pain in his chest was that felt like he'd been shot at close range with a high caliber shot-gun. When he looked down, in his stomach, there was a five inch stake protruding out of his body.

He looked up. Klaus was slouched in the chair opposite him, watching with thinly veiled amusement.

"So your little pet staked you during the night, too, did she brother?" he asked, with a smirk. Elijah didn't reply, only pulled the stake out of him and tossed it to the side, looking mutinous. He could see a circular patch of blood in the middle of Klaus's shirt that must have come from exactly the same wound. "Bad form. Though I have to say, if you're really that bad in bed, then I wouldn't blame her."

"Enough," snarled Elijah, his patience snapping.

This was not the way he liked things. He liked neat kills and very little bleeding and organization and precision. And the unexpected just angered him.

He was not sure whom he was more angry with: Clare, for attempting to kill him in his sleep; or himself, for not seeing this coming.

Elijah ripped off his bloodied shirt, searching for a new one viciously. "I'm going to find her, and I'm going to kill her," he told Klaus, his voice like whiplash.

_I should never have trusted that woman. _

And why had he even trusted her in the first place?

But it was rhetorical question; with Clare it had never just been about answers, it had been about impulse - being drawn to something for no easily explainable reason except that you were.

Maybe, if he'd slept on it, he'd have thought differently and not been so full of betrayal and humiliation and rage. Sometimes things all looked different in the morning (and hadn't that been exactly what she'd wished for, anyway?)

As it was, Elijah's only coherent thought right then was anger and to kill, but before he could take another breath, Klaus had him by the throat.

"And is this going to be before or after I kill _you_," he hissed in his face. "You see, after I woke up staked to my bed, I decided to do some background research on that the little pet you bought home. It turns out you sneaked _Clare Kennedy_ into this house right under my nose." His self-restraint suddenly snapped, and he threw Elijah across the room, where he slammed into a book shelf. "WHAT WERE YOU _THINKING_?" Before he could get up, Klaus had flashed over and had him pinned to the ground again, this time with the discarded stake in his hand. "I should have known that I could never trust you," he spat.

Elijah curled his lips into a wordless snarl, knowing that this was normally the part where Klaus would attempt to put him in a coffin for another indefinite number of years. But anger at Clare, at the situation was pulsating through him like adrenaline and he managed to wrestle the stake out of his brother's hand and all but attempted to crucify him to the floor with it.

"That line's getting old, Niklaus," he said, his voice cold. In one swift motion, that could have almost looked as if he was about to stake his brother through the heart, Elijah stood, dropped the stake and turned his back on Klaus once again; walking out of the room.

* * *

Downstairs, Rebekah lounged on a sofa. As he entered the room she raised an eyebrow – taking in his stained clothing. "You promised to take me out for breakfast this morning," she said, calmly.

Elijah made a noncommittal sound in the back of his throat. _Where would Clare have gone next? What was she planning to do? _

That was the worst part: he had no idea.

Rebekah continued to pester him: "I thought you were a 'man of your word," she forced, petulantly. "We haven't done anything together in ages."

"I don't know if you've noticed, Rebekah, but this family doesn't do _together_," Elijah commented curtly, his mind elsewhere. He had no idea…no idea…He just knew he wanted to find Clare Kennedy and make her pay.

Rebekah appeared in front of him, arms folded. "Maybe it's time that we did."

"We're not having one of your sibling therapy sessions."

"Yes we are, Elijah!" she suddenly yelled. Something inside his only sister snapped and suddenly words burst forth like water rushing from a broken dam. "Because this family is breaking apart. You can see it; I can see it and I'm fed up to hell with all of it!" Her voice became quieter. "I want to fix this. I want to be a _family_."

He reached out and touched her chin, something about him softening. "How long have you kept all this bottled up?"

"Too long."

She didn't take her eyes off of him as she waited for his answer.

He sighed. "Fine."

He owed this to his sister.

Rebekah nodded, the vulnerability about her face retreating. "Okay," she muttered. "Let's go."

They made their way to a small café in the middle of Mystic Falls – _Rosie's _– eclectic, stylish; the kind of place where customers might be writing a screenplay on their laptop whilst mainlining coffee.

They were seated in a quiet corner and Rebekah ordered. "I want two croissants and two pots of tea," she said, not glancing at the menu the waiter offered her.

"Brits?" the guy smirked whilst jotting something down on a notepad. Before she could reply, though, his hand lifted to his forehead. "Damn," he muttered, screwing his eyes shut for a moment. "Had this headache on and off for two days now."

"Did I ask for your life story?!" Rebekah snapped, but Elijah held up his hand, silencing her before she could say anything more.

He gazed at the human boy before him intently. "Headache?"

"Yeah…just blacking out every now and then."

"For how long?" Elijah leaned forward in his seat a little more. "Can you remember anything before two days ago?"

"Jeez, are you Dr. House or something?" the waiter grimaced, unable to tell if Elijah was joking or not.

"Just answer the question," he snarled.

"My memories fine, man. Just the headaches."

Inside Elijah, everything stopped. The young man's eyes were black, but that wasn't just it – Elijah's eyes slid passed him, taking in the other café patrons: the mother with the baby in the stroller – her eyes were black. The man serving coffee over the counter, him too. The teenage boy sitting at the table behind Rebekah with enough rings in his ear to resemble a shower curtain rod; his black eyes were trained on the phone in his hands.

And there were more; Elijah estimated at least half of those occupying the café.

"It's not just Clare," he whispered, his blood ice in his veins.

He then stood abruptly, dragging a protesting Rebekah up with him. "We're leaving," he said.

"Hey, you haven't even had your food!" the waiter protested.

Elijah took out a twenty from his pocket and stuffed it into the human boy's hand. "Your tip," he said, sardonic, before grabbing his sisters hand and dragging her out of the café.

"Elijah, stop! What are you – _Elijah_!" Rebekah managed to tear her hand out of her brother's grip. "What the _hell _are you doing?"

He turned to face her, running a hand through his hair. His eyes were flitting to the face of every passer-by, checking their eyes. He couldn't shake the feeling that they were surrounded. "Go back to the house, Rebekah," he ordered. "And stay there."

She folded her arms. "Why?"

"It's not safe out here."

"Well I've got people to see at the Grill in an hour so –"

"Go back to the house Rebekah. His tone indicated that there wouldn't be any more argument. He should have known his sister better.

"I can look after myself," she said, stubbornly.

"It's not _safe _–"

"_I can look after __**myself**_."

His eyes were on her face now, unwavering. For a moment they just stood, silent, empty words caught between one-another like a soap bubble.

Finally he swallowed. "Then go."

He tried to tell himself she would be alright. She was an Original vampire, after all.

* * *

Just as Seth and Damon were walking into the police station, Ross was walking out.

"Hey," said Seth, grabbing his partners elbow. "I thought you were going to help with the Kennedy interrogation?"

"I was, man," Ross muttered, rubbing the back of his neck with a hand. "But I've been getting these headaches and Sheriff Forbes just sent me out to check on the towns vervain supply so-"

"Oh, right."

"I'm sorry, Seth-"

"Nah, it's okay. This is one headache you're probably gonna want to miss," he said, referring to the woman inside.

But despite his words, Seth felt like a weight had suddenly been put onto his shoulders. He and Ross hadn't gotten off on the best start, but he'd thought that he'd be able to make that up once they were put on a case together.

"Does this mean you have an opening for 'partner-against-crime' now," broke in Damon, smirking. "Cause, y'know, in a past life I think I was a cop."

"That," said Seth, rolling his eyes. "Is highly unlikely. C'mon," he muttered, pushing the double doors into the station open. Inside, it was quieter than usual. Seth wasn't wearing his uniform and it somehow it made him feel…off.

"I can't believe we finally got her," Seth said, to distract himself.

Damon glanced at him. "She handed herself in, you make it sound like you did something."

He ignored the jibe. "I didn't. The time that I step forward and do something is now."

"You're the one that gets people to talk," Damon said, simply. It wasn't a question.

Seth's mouth twisted into a grimace. "I get political points if I can do it with out causing bodily harm. Somehow, interrogation never seems to go that way, though."

Damon didn't seem phased. "If you want my advice, ditch the guilty conscience. It makes things easier."

"Me having a conscience, Damon," Seth said. "Is what separates me, from the likes of you."

"Ouch. Guessing _you _don't want to become a vampire any time soon, then?"

Seth felt bile and a dozen flip responses make their way up his throat, but the one that actually came out with was just the default. "Never. I hate everything you stand for."

The change in Damon was so sudden that Seth barely had time to blink before the vampire's hand was round his throat, his face pushed up close to his. "You better learn that thing's aren't black and white in this town, and you better learn it fast, my friend," he snarled, slamming Seth's head back against the wall for emphasis. "Your little vendetta against vampires' is going to get you nowhere."

"Let go of me," Seth rasped, struggling for air.

"_DAMON_!" The cry came from Meredith, who had just appeared in the room, Liz Forbes at her side. "What are you _doing_?!"

Damon let go of Seth's throat with a snarl and Seth sunk to his knees, trying to regain his breath.

"Let's just go and interrogate the serial killer so I can leave," muttered Damon.

Sheriff Forbes stopped him. "Damon, you can't. Kennedy's killed almost thirty vampires. It would be suicide for you if she suddenly snapped."

"I think he should do it," Seth choked out immediately.

Damon shot him a glare.

"Guys," said Meredith, with an air of exasperation. "Can we please just…_not_?"

She dragged Damon to the side, leaving Seth with Sheriff Forbes. "Do you make it your life's aim to try and kill every person you meet?" she hissed under her breath.

"If I recall correctly, _Doc_, I haven't laid a finger on you – seems your just about overdue a great big Damon-welcome."

"Don't even," she said, passing a hand over her forehead. "All I'm asking is that you try and co-operate a little better."

"Oh _please_. Co-operate? Have you tried to tell Officer Friendly that? The guy has a complete grudge against _anything_ supernatural."

"Then prove him wrong," Meredith insisted. "Because at the moment all you're showing him is that he's right."

Damon looked at the intently for a moment. "I'm not promising anything," he said, finally.

She smiled slightly. "I don't want you to. I just want you to try."

He rolled his eyes. "What is it with woman and wanting me to be a 'better person'?"

"Elena, too?" she smirked.

"Let's not go down the Elena route."

Her smirk grew wider but she didn't comment, just strolled back to Seth and Sheriff Forbes whilst Damon checked his phone.

There was one text, from Elijah: _Clare Kennedy isn't the only one. Be careful. _

He frowned. Quickly sent back _'What?' _and made his way back over to the group.

Seth was now standing on his feet, deep in conversation with Liz Forbes. "You could have told me I was going to have to interview Kennedy with out Ross," he said, raising an eye brow at her.

"Sorry?"

"Ross. You sent him out looking for _vervain_ when we have serial killer in the back room? What's that all about?"

Too late, Seth realized by the expression on his boss's face that she had no idea what he was talking about.

"I didn't send Officer Forier out anywhere."

The pair suddenly stared at each other; it was so quiet you could have heard a penny drop.

Damon glanced down at his phone and he suddenly realized what Elijah had meant. "Clare Kennedy isn't the only one," he repeated a loud.

"You're kidding?" said Liz, composure suddenly broken as she turned white. "How do you know? Why would Forier be working with _her_?"

But Seth had suddenly thought of something more pressing and a whole lot more dangerous. "Vervain," he said, loudly as comprehension hit him. "Ross said he was going to check up on the vervain."

Meredith caught on to his train of thought too. "He wasn't going to _check _on it," she whispered. "He was going to _take _it."

"How'd he know where to go?" snapped Damon, angrily.

"We have a list of all the known places where vervain is kept. He'll have got locations from that," said Sheriff Forbes.

"I'm going after him," said Damon, grimly. "Where would he be going first, Liz? Where's the closest place?"

She paused, looking suddenly serious. "The Boarding House, Damon. The closest place that holds vervain is the Boarding House."


	11. Perdition

**PERDITION**

* * *

"Hey, Seth – Seth – look at me," Liz Forbes instructed forcefully. "Look at me."

Seth was, in fact, looking at her, but he had the general idea of what she meant. There were a million thoughts crammed into his mind, and his head felt too heavy to handle the even _thinking _right now. How could Ross, his partner for little over a week, be working with a killer? How had _he _missed that as the officer in charge of the investigation?

He had no idea how to process a nightmare this big: one that was seemed to be getting worse by the hour. And now, he was expected to interrogate Clare Kennedy after just being made painfully aware of the fact that they didn't hold all the cards - in fact, he was pretty sure that right now none of them even knew the game they were playing.

"Forget about Ross," Liz Forbes instructed him. "Concentrate on Clare Kennedy. I need to get as much information from her as quickly as possible and you're the best person to do that for me. Okay? I need you to focus. This is what we hired you for."

"I know."

Liz was leading him to the back of the station to the holding room where three officers flanked the door. Meredith trailed behind them, looking serious.

"Don't let her side track you," Liz continued. "Find out how many people she's working with and find out if these are random killings or targeted."

"And why she's doing this."

Liz nodded, her lips tight. "Then get the hell out of there and report back to me – don't talk to anyone else."

Seth swallowed, understanding what she meant. With Ross gone, they had no idea how deep into the police force this went. Suddenly, everybody seemed like the enemy.

"How long have you held her for?" he asked.

"An hour."

"Anyone spoken to her yet?"

"Sucher – to do the custody report."

"And how did she seem?"

"…he said she seemed shaken up. Crying."

"Unstable?"

"She won't attack you. She's restrained."

"That's not what I meant." They halted in front of the door and Seth glanced behind him at Meredith. "I want you to come in with me."

"I'm not a psychiatrist," Meredith warned him, catching on quickly as to why he wanted her. "I'm a doctor."

Seth shrugged. "I might need someone with medical knowledge."

She crossed her arms, considering, and then nodded. "Fine."

Seth turned to Liz, frowning. "Something's happened to make Kennedy hand herself in. It could be to keep us distracted from the bigger picture. Keep an eye out."

Liz shot him a dry look. "I'll do my job if you'll do yours. Get in there."

"Yes ma'am," he said, giving her a slight smirk. But it quickly faded as one of the officers unlocked the door and assured him and Meredith into the room.

He touched the gun strapped to his belt once, just to reassure himself it was there and then everything else was wiped from his mind as his eyes fell on Clare Kennedy for the first time.

Sure, he had seen her in photos, but it was different to see her in person.

For one, she did not look like the monster his mind had built her up to be. She'd looked up as he'd entered the room and her face was tear-streaked, pale and tired looking.

Seth forced himself to associate this woman with the image that would forever be ingrained in his mind of the massacre in the hotel room. Not just the dead vampires, but the dead _human _man.

This was a woman who had murdered, and who would murder again, despite all appearance.

And that realization forced him to notice other things – the black of her eyes and the blood that had obviously been washed off of her, but was still crusted around her fingernails.

The room was small and bare and grey. The only objects in it were a table with two chairs either end. Kennedy was sat on the one facing the door, her ankles and wrists cuffed to its arms and legs and Seth took the one opposite her, leaving Meredith to hover a little behind him.

Clare Kennedy's eyes met his, their darkness unsettling in every sense – yet the request she made was shockingly human.

"Could…I have…some water?" she asked, her voice scratchy and raw. "Please."

Seth glanced at Meredith and nodded once. She turned and knocked on the door; it was opened, and she whispered something to the guard on the other side and presently a plastic cup of water was handed to her.

The door closed again with an ominous creek.

"There you go," said Meredith quietly, settling the cup on the table in front of the woman.

She stared at it for a moment. "My hands…" she whispered.

Seth's eyes narrowed. "We're not uncuffing you."

The woman glanced at him and then miserably at the cup of water that sat before her, taunting her.

He shifted in his seat slightly and fixed his gaze on her. The first rule of interrogation was to sound like you knew more than you did; that you weren't simply walking into the whole mess blind. The second rule was to walk a fine line between intimidation and impassiveness. Seth had been in this situation at least twenty times before – but never on this scale.

"Why did you hand yourself in?" he started off.

"I didn't want to kill more people."

His mouth twisted into a sardonic grimace. "A compassionate murderer…or did you just get bored?"

Her eyes didn't flash when she was angry like a normal person's would. They stirred. Like an animal uncoiling itself – almost hypnotic.

"I didn't know what I was doing. I can't remember anything."

That didn't surprise Seth as much as it should – they nearly always played the mental illness card early on; in court, claiming mental-instability was a sure-fire was to shorten jail-time.

"Anything?" echoed Meredith.

Clare's eyes flickered up to her, as if she was just noticing that she was there for the first time. "Anything that occurred before three days ago is a complete blank. From there it's sporadic. I'm blacking out for short periods of time with no memory of what happened."

"Hysterical amnesia," nodded Meredith. She looked at Seth. "The complete and utter loss of sense of self and all past memories. It's normally triggered by like a traumatic occurrence or…or a head injury." She glanced at Clare. "You should have regained all memory with in 48 hours though."

"But I haven't."

Meredith's mouth twisted. "Which is why none of this makes sense. You need a brain scan."

"What I need is my life back!" Clare bit out, angrily.

Seth's eyes narrowed. "Do you think the people you killed are going to get _their_ lives back?" he asked, very quietly.

It was silent. Kennedy had gone white.

He stood from his seat, deciding to change tactics. "You cooperate now and we'll release you for brain scans at the hospital to try and fix your memory. We'll dig up a relative who could help you. So tell me now: why are you doing this?"

Hope sparked in Clare's eyes, coupled with frustration and desperation. "I already told you, I don't know!"

"That's not good enough," snapped Seth. "Is there anyone who approached you – spoke to you – which gave you a clue as to what caused you kill those vampires?"

"No, there were vampires hunting me down constantly – sent by a man called…called Klaus! Please, there was nothing. I've been running for three days now - you have to help me!" Her voice rising steadily louder and she gave a strange jerk, as if to stand up from her seat – but the restraints stopped her from moving. "It's schizophrenia or something. I just have to get better!"

"_Dig deeper_!" he yelled. "THINK! Tell me what happened to you three days ago! _Remember_!"

"Seth-" broke in Meredith.

"A lot of people are going to die if this woman doesn't remember something!" he snapped, rounding on her and pointing at Clare. "We –"

It was the eyes.

Clare's eyes that warned him.

The stirring in them he had seen earlier when she was angry.

It was there now.

Except this time it was a shift – intangible yet at the same time so noticeable. Dangerous.

Out of pure instinct his hands found his gun; the 9mm semi-auto held at the ready before him with a practiced speed.

"Seth!" Meredith yelled, but then suddenly Kennedy disappeared – as if she'd literally been obliterated from existence - only to reappear, standing, behind the chair she'd just been cuffed to.

Adrenaline – so sharp it was almost painful – coursed through his veins.

"_How did you do that_?" he asked harshly, re-evaluating his whole impression of her. "What are you!?"

The light above their heads began to flicker and Clare Kennedy – but he could almost sense that it _wasn't _Clare Kennedy, but something far, far more evil – smirked. "You have about…thirty seconds until the light goes off…" she said. Her voice was different and unsettling – mocking, almost sing-song.

He flicked off the safety on the gun.

"What are you?" Meredith asked, her voice shaking.

She didn't answer. The light continued to flicker, more violently now – the whole room flashing into darkness every second.

"Open the door," Seth instructed Meredith, struggling to stay calm.

"It's locked from the outside!" she yelled, and he could hear her banging on the door behind him but no sound could be heard from the other side; no move was made to open the door. "Why aren't they opening it?!"

"Fifteen seconds."

Seth tried to keep a level head. "What do you want?" he shouted at the red-headed woman, his heart pounding.

"Revenge," she whispered.

"Why?"

"For something that happened along time ago."

"Give me a straight answer!"

"Or what?" she mocked.

He trained the gun on her forehead. "Clare Kennedy is human," he said. "That's a human body. If I shoot you. You die."

She cocked her head to the side. The action was eerie – staggered by the flashing lights so he saw each movement in pieces. "Clever. But what's to stop me finding a new host in one of you once she's dead?"

He swallowed. _Host_. "What happens when the lights go out?"

"Three seconds," she grinned.

"_OPEN THE DOOR_!" Meredith half screamed half yelled.

Oh Jesus, he thought, vaguely noticing that his hands were shaking – which didn't bode well for an on-target shot – oh Christ.

Clare Kennedy stood, illuminated before them by the sudden harsh light, and then his sight of her died as the light shut off once again.

He waited in the blackness for a split second for it to flicker back on but it didn't.

"What happens when the light goes off, Officer Lakeman?" Her voice whispered in the absolute darkness. He turned his head in a fruitless attempt at sight.

"You tell me."

There was a chilling laugh and Seth gave up on trying to locate her and closed his eyes. Her voice seemed to be coming from every direction and he guessed that she was transporting and reappearing in different areas of the room.

"You wanna play? Come on!" he yelled. "Show yourself."

"But that wouldn't be any fun."

He jumped. She was right in front of him. He could feel her breath on his face.

There was pressure on the gun; she was holding it over his hands.

"You humans aren't killers. That's why you're so good at it – the naivety…the fear with which you take a life. It's almost…cute."

His fingers twitched, but her hands held his clamped round the gun, directing it forwards with an inhuman strength. Keeping it pointed at her.

"Why did you take Clare Kennedy's body?"

"We want the same thing you know," she whispered, ignoring him. "You can help us."

"Do what?"

He could almost _feel _her smile in the darkness. "You see the spark for the fire, Officer Lakeman. You see the bodies we leave – but the larger picture still eludes you."

He shivered. "You said you wanted revenge."

"Yes."

"Against vampires."

"Yes."

He hesitated. Meredith was clutching the back of his shirt desperately – a reminder of reality. "If I helped…"

"-Seth, no –" Meredith whispered.

He ignored her. "…if I helped you kill them," he said, "…how could I know you wouldn't kill innocent people? We found a human male among your victims."

"We need humans – who else would be our hosts?"

He shook his head, then realized she wouldn't be able to see the action in the darkness. "That's not good enough."

"Then it seems you have limited choices, Seth Lakeman. Either stand with us and aid the annihilation of vampires that have threatened your town for years, or stand against us and be killed now, in this room."

Seth felt his heart beating loudly in his chest. He could feel his eyes straining against the darkness to see her but he knew that she was _right there_. "I can't help you because I don't believe you," he said, finally. "You came to Mystic Falls with a purpose. You could have killed vampires anywhere in America, but instead you traveled for two days to come here. _Why_?"

She didn't answer. The hand that held his to the gun loosened and he felt her withdraw slightly.

Suddenly Meredith let out a scream and he felt her hand being ripped away from the back of his shirt. The lights came back on.

On the other side of the table, Clare stood with Meredith held against her, and though the human woman struggled, she didn't seem to be able to pull away from her grip.

"You won't shoot," Clare snarled, eyes flickering to the gun Seth held at the ready.

"That's what you think."

She smiled. "You won't shoot. That bullet travels faster than sound. I can crush her skull into her brain and pull her dead corpse in front of me to block the bullet before its half way across the room."

"There are six shells in this gun – I reckon I can hit you with one of them."

She laughed. "I'd like to see you try."

"How many of you are there?"

"I don't know."

"What do you mean you don't know?"

"There could be hundreds of us…we could be infinite. I don't know."

"How can you not?"

She was quiet, and suddenly Seth smirked. "That's a secret, isn't it? A big reveal."

"Maybe."

"How did you get here? Why have you suddenly appeared now?"

Clare suddenly fisted a hand in Meredith's hair and pulled hard until she cried out. "You know what I think?"

"What do you think?"

"I think I'm the one with the bargaining chip – so are you going to help us or not?"

"What will you do to her if I say no?" he asked, nodding to Meredith.

"Where would be the fun in anything, if I told you? Fear is 75% suspense."

He lowered the gun fractionally, and then re-trained it on her forehead.

"You're talking crazy."

"You think I'm bluffing," she grinned.

He was silent, watching the woman warily for a moment. "What would I need to do?"

"Find me a witch."

"Why?"

"Ask too many questions and I'll still kill her."

He swallowed, but pushed further. "Why can't you find one yourself?"

She didn't answer, slamming Meredith's head down on the table in front of them sharply.

Meredith yelled out, sinking to the floor on her knees and clutching her head, but Clare dragged her up by her hair again forcing her to half bend over the table with a firm grip on the back of her neck.

"I warned you about the questions – next time it'll be ten times harder; and when she regains consciousness she won't be able to use her brain."

Seth's throat felt like sandpaper. Meredith was struggling to look up at him, her head forced into a position so that she had to look directly down at the table.

Her eyes met his and he could see the fear swimming in them, that she was in a lot of pain.

Seth mentally prepared himself to fire, holding the gun more firmly in his hands. "What do you want with this town?" he tried, one last time.

Clare narrowed her eyes, and he saw her tighten her grip round the back of Meredith's neck; the intention in her eyes cruel.

Before Seth could shoot the gun, Clare pulled Meredith's arm all the way back behind her until it broke with a hideous snapping sound.

She let out a blood-curling scream and he fired once. Twice. Three times.

Clare fell back instantly, two spots of blood beginning to bloom on her shirt where his bullets had hit her. The third bullet had gone through the side of her neck, but by her labored breathing and choking, he guessed the bullet had missed all main arteries - leaving her lying on the ground almost paralyzed.

"Oh God!" Meredith cried out, attempting to put pressure on the wounds with her free arm – her broken one cradled against her chest. She looked up at him. "Seth you…you shot her!"

"She was going to kill you."

"Whatever had control of her _mind_ was going to kill me. This – _this _body that's dying now? - this is an innocent woman!"

He hurried over, slipping the gun back into its holster on his belt. By the blood that was collecting round Clare's body, she didn't have long left. "Get up," he said, grasping Meredith's shoulder. "C'mon we have to go."

She looked up at him. "_What_?"

"Look at her _eyes _Meredith," he hissed. And she did.

Clare Kennedy – as they had seen her – had never looked so human. All color had drained from her face. Her chest was moving up and down spasmodically with breaths that half choked her as they burst from her throat.

And her eyes - that were fixed on a random spot just to the side of Meredith's thigh - were turning a rapidly clear shade of blue.

"We have to go," he said, urgently. "Otherwise in a second one of us isn't going to know who we are anymore either."

Meredith shook her head. "This is so wrong. I can't just…"

"I know," he muttered, but she didn't resist as he pulled her to her feet.

"The door –" she remembered.

He checked behind him once again at Clare's body on the ground. Still just alive. "Something tells me we won't have to worry about that now."

* * *

It was rare that Elijah ever felt fear like this. It had been years, decades; _centuries_ since he had felt fear like _this_.

Or maybe that wasn't the right description of it.

The fear was there – greater than it had been in a long time – but contained, controlled carefully in the back of his mind.

"Damon," he greeted; the first person he'd thought to call, "tell me you know where she is."

"_I would if I knew who you were talking about_."

Elijah's face tightened. "Clare. Clare Kennedy. Where is he she?"

Damon paused. Elijah could hear a car revving in the background. "_You mean you don't know_?

"No. Enlighten me."

"_She handed herself in. She's at the police station now._"

Out of genuine remorse for her actions - or was it merely another tactical move on her part? Elijah thought bitterly to himself, his hand instinctively moving to the spot on his chest where she had staked him. She was good at deception.

"Where are you going now?" he asked.

"_Home. Somebody's rounding up all the vervain in town and they're hitting there first." _

Elijah was quiet for a second. "Maybe it's about time we thought about leaving MysticFalls."

"_Are you serious? We don't even know how dangerous they are!" _

"And I don't want to just wait around to find out," he snapped. "If these people are out to kill us, we don't just paint targets on ourselves and wait for them to come find us!"

"_You're an Original vampire,_" scoffed Damon. "_Stop jumping at shadows and act like one." _He ended the call, and Elijah growled in frustration, thrusting his phone back into his pocket and heading out of town towards the woods. From there, he sped towards the police station, which looked like it was in a state of anarchy.

He found Sheriff Forbes standing with a woman he remembered to be called Meredith Fell and a tall, blonde haired police officer. All three of them looked shaken; the Doctor's arm appeared to be broken and there was blood on her hands and face; the officer was running his hands through his hair, glancing regularly over at a door at the back of the building.

"What are you doing here?" the Sheriff demanded, when she saw him.

"I'm here to see Clare Kennedy."

Her mouth hung open for a second before she quickly regained her composure. "The hell you are," she said, finally. "She's dead."

Elijah's hands, which had slipped into the pockets of his suit pants, balled into fists. "_What_?"

"She tried to attack one of my officers and his partner. He shot her." By the sound of her voice, she was less than pleased. "She was our only lead."

"She was your only _lead_ –" he echoed, half disbelieving, half furious. "She's our only _hope_. Where is she?!"

The male officer's eyes flickered from the door to his face and Elijah suddenly understood; turning and striding down the corridor towards it.

"You can't go in there!" the man yelled, grabbing his arm as Elijah lay a hand on the door.

"Don't touch me."

The man ignored him. "When we were interrogating her, she said something about being a host. She was being controlled by something. Someone. Whatever it is, when she dies, it's going to need a new body."

That was enough for him. He shoved open the door.

The first thing his eyes fell onto was Clare. In a room of grey cement, the redness of her hair and blood stood out in stark contrast. He pushed down the hunger he felt at her scent and instead focused on the sound of her rapidly failing heartbeat.

Clare's head moved infinitesimally until her startling blue eyes met his.

"_Help…me_," she whispered.

Elijah ran over and knelt by her; ripping savagely into his wrist with his fangs and holding it over her head so that his blood dripped down into her mouth.

Her gaze never left his face and in one, bitter sweet moment; he watched her body heal itself and the darkness slowly creep back into her eyes until they were entirely black again.

He watched her blink once. Twice. And then he saw a flicker of comprehension dart across her face and suddenly Clare gave a sharp gasp and her hand flew to the side of her neck where the gunshot wound had been as she sat upright.

"What happened?"

"You were shot," he said, steadily. He stood up; put some space between them. "What's the last thing you remember?"

"Being restrained to that chair over there," she said, nodding over to the desk. She looked at the puddle of blood on the floor. "Who shot me?"

"A police officer...does it matter?"

"Just because I can't remember what happened doesn't make it meaningless."

Irritation - hot and acidic - burnt through his veins. "Ironic that you should say that," he mused darkly, "because I was staked in my sleep last night..."

"That's horrible."

"...by you."

Her whole body froze, taut as a wire. "I don't remember -"

"You wouldn't," he murmured, walking closer - forgetting that he should be furious. He brushed some red hair out of her eyes. She trembled slightly, and he suddenly became aware of her fragility. "I was convinced you would though - that that, at least, would stick. But it didn't...nothing ever does with you..."

"They thought maybe that it was schizophrenia...hysterical amnesia."

"Whose 'they'?"

She grimaced slightly. "Probably the people that shot me."

Elijah paused, wondering whether to tell her what was really going on: that her mind was being controlled by something - someone - else.

Ignorance seemed so much kinder.

"You healed her."

The voice came from the doorway, and they both turned to see the blonde officer. He heard a small hiss escape Clare, and watched her eyes drift to the gun and back to his face - making the connection.

"She's the only one that's had her memory entirely wiped of her past," he said, putting a hand on her arm to restrain her from doing anything stupid. "Which means there's something there that could be important."

"That would make a lot of sense," said Liz Forbes, suddenly arriving at the other policeman's side. She was holding a file with a few sheets of paper in. Her gaze slipped to Clare and her expression turned grim. "Maybe we should discuss this in another room...Miss Kennedy, if you could sit back in the seat so we could restrain you again."

"There's no point," the blonde man muttered.

"It's for my own peace of mind, Officer Lakeman."

Clare reluctantly sat back down, watching soundlessly as Liz secured and locked the cuffs once again her ankles and wrists. She wriggled her fingers experimentally. round "How long are you going to be?" she asked, looking apprehensively around her. There was blood sprayed everywhere. _Her _blood.

Elijah could not think of a worse room to be left alone in.

"Not long. We'll send someone in to...clean up," reassured the Sheriff.

Both men followed her out of the room, and the moment the door was locked behind them, she whirled round to face them.

"We've just got information through on her relatives…her remaining closest relative – her father – was a professor on Demonology."

"You're kidding," the blonde haired man said flatly.

"Unfortunately, no. He lives in Chicago – he was the one that alerted the authorities that she'd gone missing whilst in Virginia."

"So she needs to go to Chicago," said Elijah, folding his arms.

Sheriff Forbes sighed, shaking her head. "We don't know we can trust her not to randomly snap and I can't spare the officers when the town could be facing some kind of take-over."

"So make a phone call," Officer Lakeman shrugged. "It's easier than taking her half way across the country."

"We've tried. We can't contact him."

Elijah scowled, realizing the only available option they had. "I'll take her."

"Is that safe?" asked the other man. "She...they…are targeting vampires. If she had another black-out…"

"She has to go to see her father. A human would be too easily killed if they accompanied her," objected Elijah. "She needs someone that can keep her in check if anything were to happen."

"That's a fourteen hour drive from here to Chicago," said Liz Forbes, and for the first time Elijah really saw the dark circles beginning to form under her eyes and the strain in the voice. "It would take you almost two days depending on how long you stayed. I don't want to think what's going to happen to the town in that time."

"Liz," said Elijah. "I doubt you'll want to think about what's going to happen to the town if she _doesn't _go."


	12. Lions and Lambs

**LIONS AND LAMBS**

* * *

Elena reached out to open her bedroom door and, for the third time that week, tore the handle straight off.

She looked at the length of brass in her hand and forced back a migraine by pressing her free fingers against her forehead. "This is going to take a lot of getting used to," she muttered, walking carefully down the stairs as if they could possibly be made of glass.

"Stefan?" she yelled, reaching the main hallway.

There was a tremor behind her – a shift in the air that as a human, Elena would not have been able to pick up on. If she had turned around now, she would have jumped out of her skin.

But as a vampire she was able to turn and look her boyfriend in the eye unflinchingly. "I'm sorry," she said, dumping the handle on a side table. "When you and Damon told me stories about becoming a vampire you never mentioned how hard it was to get used to the super strength."

Stefan's eyes did not leave the dull brass shine of the door handle as she talked, and even moments after she'd said her last few words, his gaze still lingered there.

When his eyes – almost unwillingly – met hers, she felt her heart sink. Stefan's eyes had always been devastatingly expressive, and now she saw the worry there; plain as day. His hand rubbed up and down her arm soothingly a few times before he said, slowly: "That's because there is no acclimatization phase, Elena. Your brain handles everything almost instantly." He looked at her intently for a moment. "Do you think, on some levels, you're still in denial about all of…this?"

"You mean am I still in denial about me being a vampire – when I said that I never wanted to be one?" she asked, leaning back away from him slightly and raising her eyebrows. "Of course I am Stefan! This…this isn't what I wanted for myself! And I'm trying so hard to make the best of this but –"

Suddenly her words dropped off.

Stefan's fingers were biting into the skin of her upper arm and she noticed that he was looking at a spot over her shoulder. She turned, and blinked.

At the end of the corridor was a man.

He wore the heavy-duty uniform of a police officer and looked middle-aged – his black hair graying slightly at the temples – and had that _look_ of someone who had children.

Elena recognized him from around town – though he looked strangely tense in a way she had never seen the man – or anyone else – seem before.

His eyes were fixed on her and Stefan.

"Can we help you?" she asked, folding her arms in a way that mirrored Stefan, at the same time he said:

"How did you get in?"

The officer's whole body relaxed; the change occurring so abruptly it gave Elena whiplash. "Sorry," he said, one corner of his mouth pulling up into a chagrinned, lop-side smile. "The door's open," he rambled, "– and I just figured –"

Here, he paused, and then diverted his line of conversation, approaching Stefan with his hand outstretched. "Officer Ross Fourier."

"Stefan Salvatore," said Stefan, shaking the offered hand. A strange look crossed the police officer's face as his skin touched Stefan's, but it was gone as quickly as it had appeared.

He frowned. "I was sent here to talk to your brother, Damon, about something, actually…"

" – he's out," Elena interjected. "…he went out." She glanced up at Stefan and then back at Ross. "Is it important that you see him?"

"Yeah, it is."

"He'll be back by this evening if you want to drop back round –"

"- no. No. It has to be now."

Stefan regarded the older man carefully for a moment. "Damon is a…very invested member of the town council," he said; slowly, calculatingly.

"So I've been told."

"As his brother, I hope to be a member of the town council when I am old enough, too. Damon shares _a lot _of what is said in the council meetings with me."

Realization flitted across Ross's face like a bird's shadow. "You know?" his eyes flickered to Elena. "You both know?"

"We know about the vampires."

"Okay…okay," he repeated, frowning down at the floor for a moment and rubbing his forehead. "I'm going to ignore that a member of the town council released strictly confidential information to his _seventeen _year old brother –"

- _who's actually one hundred and forty three_ thought Elena -

"- and cut to the chase. We've had an influx of vampire activity on the town's boarder. We would be able to handle it, but we've used up our supply of vervain. Your brother's been donating vervain to the police force monthly, and I've been sent by Sheriff Forbes to pick up the latest batch early." He looked at Stefan. "We need this stuff right away."

"How do I know you're a cop?" Stefan asked. "I'm not about to just hand over my brother's entire supply of vervain to just anyone."

"It's okay, Stefan," Elena interrupted, glancing over at Ross. "I've seen him round Mystic Falls most of my life. He definitely works with Caroline's mom. If they need it…give it to them"

Ross shook his head. "No, it's okay – I get it." He showed them his badge. "I've been in the force with Sheriff Forbes thirteen years now, and I've been on the front line in the fight against vampires for the same amount of time." He looked Stefan in the eye. "I have done and will do everything within my power to eradicate them. So please, we need that vervain."

Elena felt her skin crawl as she registered the hatred in the Ross's voice. _I'm a vampire_, she thought to herself. _You want to kill me, and I'm standing right in front of you_.

"I understand," Stefan murmured. "Follow me – stay up here," he added to Elena.

She nodded reluctantly; biting her lip as she watched Stefan lead the officer down to the basement.

She wondered what had caused the police department to have such a problem with vampires this time – and what had drawn them to Mystic Falls now. Whatever it was, it had to be big, and she thought it strange that neither Stefan nor Damon apparently knew what was going on…although, this wouldn't be the first time they'd kept important facts from her.

Elena's left hand balled into a fist, and her eyes once again fell onto that brass door handle and she mulled over what it symbolized.

She wasn't weak anymore. Physically, at least.

They didn't _have _to keep things from her now. And she could mold herself into something entirely different based on this new strength.

But she'd been haunted by the same dream ever since she had become a vampire – a memory with in a dream, more like.

She was curled up on her bed, crying. In the dream, she was exactly as she was now, eternally eighteen and a vampire, but the memory stemmed from when she had been fourteen, occurring one night after school.

Her Dad was sat on the edge of her bed and he was running his hand through her hair, his fingers grazing her neck. The warmth felt so _real_ and so reassuring in the dream.

Awake, she could remember their whole conversation from that night when she was fourteen, but in the dream, her father only ever uttered a few sentences.

'_You know what you need to do, Elena?'_ He'd say, his voice reverberating through her mind like some ghostly echo._ 'If you want to know what kind of person you want to be? You need to know where you want to be, honey.' _

And then she'd open her mouth to reply and instead of words, blood would pour out and she'd wake up.

Elena's Dad had never wanted to be any place more than home or at his practice in town.

She was pulled out of her thoughts abruptly by sound of the front door unlocking round the corner. She flashed over, just in time to see Damon opening the door.

His blue eyes were wide, almost wild, and the moment they fell on her face he stormed over, grabbing her shoulders.

"Elena," he said. "Elena. Has a police officer come to the house? Asked for vervain? Knocked on the door?"

"What are you-"

"Just answer the question."

But Elena's mind was suddenly processing something more serious. She stared up at him; her eye's steadily getting wider. "Wait…did you just…unlock the door?" she asked, her heart pounding so hard in her chest that she thought it might tear right out.

"We don't have time for this," snapped Damon. "His name would have been Officer Fourier, Elena. _Have you seen him or not_?"

"He said the door was open…" she whispered to herself, pulling out from Damon's clutches and glancing back down the corridor. "Which meant he was lying…" her heart was now pounding so loudly, it was causing her pulse to crash in her ears, blocking all other sound out. "…which meant it wasn't humanly possible to get into the house…"

She felt his gaze burning into the back of her head. "If you tell me you let him in, I swear to God…"

She cut him off impatiently. "Damon, can you hear anything downstairs?"

"No."

"Exactly."

"I don't understand."

"Stefan was downstairs."

Damon's eyes closed briefly. "God dammit, Stefan," he hissed under his breath.

Elena was already running back down the corridor and forcing open the door to the basement. He followed, barreling down the stairs after her.

When she forced open the door to the vervain room, there was nothing there.

No vervain. No Stefan. No Ross.

Not even a sign of a struggle.

"I didn't…" whispered Elena, clutching the side of her head. "I don't –"

"You don't, what?" asked Damon, sourly. "You don't need a forensics team to work it out, Elena. The guy came in, stole all our vervain, and then took Stefan!"

"But you knew this was going to happen!" Elena yelled, rounding on him. "You knew he was coming here! How?"

Damon sat down heavily, leaning his back against the concrete wall. "I went to the police station. There are people in Mystic Falls looking to kill vampires, and Sheriff Forbes realized they were going round hitting everyone's vervain supplies so they could use it. The Boarding House was the first to be targeted."

"So what do we do now?"

"I don't know."

"We need to get Stefan back, Damon! They've kidnapped him!"

"Really, Elena?" snarked Damon. "I didn't know that, tell me more."

"Where was he going next?"

"What?"

"For vervain. Where was he going next?" she demanded.

"The cellar below the town hall. There's some there."

She nodded. "Okay, let's go."

He looked up. "You have a plan?"

"Beyond kidnapping the kidnapper and making him talk?" she asked. "No."

"Sounds like a good plan," he muttered, getting to his feet and following her out of the vervain room that no longer held any vervain and back up the stairs into the main house, this time, with Elena leading.

* * *

It was cold. Or colder, at least, than it had been.

Winter in Mystic Falls was always like this. With its grey, over-cast skies and chilly air – so wildly different from LA. This was Seth's first winter here. And, for any number of reasons, he thought that it would probably be his last.

Clare Kennedy had been given new clothes. She was bundled up in a thick grey coat and green scarf and stood out on the tarmac of the parking lot. A lone figure in the howling wind.

Seth had held Elijah back for a moment at the entrance to the police station, and his eyes kept flickering between the contrast of the tall, forever cool man in the crisp black suit and the agitated young woman as he spoke.

"There's something you should know," he said, his voice low and quick.

Elijah raised an eyebrow. "And what might that be?"

"She can…jump. Teleport. I don't know what to call it. Whatever it is, one second you can be talking to her in one place, and the next second she just won't be there anymore."

"Do you know the range she can do this to?" Elijah asked, sharply. "A room? A state? A country? I'm not taking her to Chicago only for everything to be ruined in a nanosecond because she can make it back to Mystic Falls before I can even _blink_."

Seth shrugged. "It's risky, sure. But I think we're all established that it has to be done."

"Is there anything I can do?"

Seth winced as he felt the memory roar back up in his head. His could still feel residual shock coursing through his veins from what had occurred barely six minutes ago. _You shot an innocent_, he told himself. _You're never going to forget that moment. Ever. _"You have about five seconds to notice the change," he said, in a brusque tone that bellied the torment currently going on in his mind. "It's pretty obvious, but you haven't got long to do anything about it once it happens. You're going to have to knock her out. Could you do that?"

"If it has to come to that," Elijah said, distastefully. His eyes never left Clare's distant form.

"When are you going?"

"As soon as possible…Now…" Elijah looked over his shoulder. "I believe your Sheriff wants a word."

Seth turned to look into the police station and saw Liz Forbes standing outside her office door with one eyebrow raised. He moved to enter the building when a voice yelled after him.

"Wait!"

Somebody grabbed his arm and he turned to see Clare Kennedy standing before him breathlessly, her cheeks pink with the cold. It was jarring to see her look so human. Jarring for the person who had wanted to kill him to now be talking to him so naturally. He began to half believe the story that she didn't remember anything whilst her mind was taken over; because how could you look at the person who shot you like they were your only hope? "Before I go," she said, desperately, "I just need to know one thing…You did a background check on me. To find my family. Did you –"

"We found your father, yes," cut in Seth, glancing back at Liz Forbes who was looking impatient. "Listen, you need to go –"

"No," said Clare, shaking his head. "That's not what I meant by family. Did you find a husband…a…a boyfriend. Children?"

Seth hesitated, feeling an unexpected lump in his throat. "I'm sorry," he said. Not really an answer, but she understood him all the same.

She seemed to deflate, the excitement gone from her eyes. "You were an archeologist," he offered.

"I was married to my job then."

"Maybe," Seth conceded. "You wouldn't be the first."

"You too?"

He grimaced. He still wasn't in uniform – just the leather jacket and jumper he'd thrown on that morning when Damon had phoned him for a drink – a badge pinned to his chest and the gun on his hip were the only things that marked him out as law enforcement. He remembered that this was supposed to be his day off. "On some levels," Seth acquiesced.

Elijah shifted on his feet behind Clare. "We need to go," he said, gently.

Her face softened as she turned round to look at him. "Are you sure youwant to do this. I –"

"I'm sure," he cut in.

"_Lakeman_!" Sheriff Forbes yelled out to Seth, impatiently – pulling him away from the intimacy of Elijah and Clare's conversation.

_One second, _he thought.

He called out to Elijah after Clare had walked across the tarmac and clambered into Elijah's car, safely out of hearing distance. Elijah turned and Seth fidgeted slightly, touching his gun. "Don't let this fuck with your head…she can kill you."

"It's not her that's going to kill me."

He gave a wry smile. "Does it make a difference?"

The vampire's eyes sparked and he shrugged, his hands slipping in to his suit pockets. "I suppose not. Good luck with your investigation Officer Lakeman."

"You too," he yelled to him over the wind.

Despite Liz Forbes' summons he stood at the top of the steps and watched Elijah slip into the car and start it, backing up smoothly and driving out onto the main road.

_You don't focus on the memories – you focus on the facts_, he remembered. That's what his boss in California had told him, advice for when he was interrogating someone. He thought how ironic it was that this time the only thing they could rely on were memories – the memories of a woman whose mind had been wiped completely blank.

Seth ducked back into the police station. It was still busy, but not with the same frantic air of earlier that morning. Everybody he saw looked slightly shell-shocked and lost, as if they had no idea what to do. The one lead they'd had they'd let drive off into the sunset with no idea whether she'd return with any useful information. And Damon had gone after Ross and they'd heard nothing back from him, either.

Yes, there was a definite sense of unease hanging in the air. Of waiting for the unexpected.

"You think you can tell me what Clare Kennedy said during interrogation, or are there any other more important things you have to deal with?" Liz Forbes asked as he approached her, her voice dripping with annoyed sarcasm.

"They want revenge," said Seth, ignoring the jibe, "against vampires."

"We knew that already," she dismissed. "What for?"

"I don't know."

"Then what do you know – because at the moment I'm running blind here, and I need something to go on dammit!"

Seth absorbed her frustration, letting it mix with his own.

"The only thing I got out of her was what she wanted – why she came to this town. She kept on saying that she needed a witch."

"A witch," repeated Liz Forbes slowly, her voice – to his ears – uncomprehending.

"I know…I'm not even sure if they actually _exist_, or if there's one in the town, or –"

He broke off as the Sheriff Forbes completely ignored his ramblings, spinning away from him abruptly to address the whole room. "Somebody find me Bonnie Bennett as a matter of urgency," she yelled.

Twenty faces turned to her with expressions of varying degrees of confusion.

Liz let out a frustrated exhale of air, dragging a hand through her hair. "That would mean _now_, people!"

* * *

Bonnie checked the clock that sat on top of the fireplace and after a few quick calculations, decided to call her father in England.

As the phone rang, she popped two pieces of bread in the toaster and poured herself a cup of coffee. It was her lazy day, and she was dressed in comfy yoga pants and an old tattered shirt. Her thick black hair was pushed out of her face with a headband.

"Dad?" asked Bonnie, as she heard someone at the end of the line pick up.

"Bonnie? Shouldn't you be at school?"

She rolled her eyes, leaning back against the kitchen counter. "It's the weekend, Dad," she said, "but nice try."

"I'm sorry, honey. The hour difference –"

"Messes you up. I know. How's London?"

"As good as it can be when you're there for business. I've been stuck in meetings most of the day."

Bonnie's father was stuck in meeting's most of his life. He was rarely, if ever, at home, but Bonnie did not voice the sentiment out loud. "That sucks. Are you still coming home Thursday?"

She heard him hesitate, and it was enough of an answer for her. "You're not coming home Thursday are you."

"The office want me to stay out a little longer. I can say no if –"

"I'm a big girl, Dad. It's fine. Stay longer if they want you to."

"I don't like the thought of you in that old house by yourself."

"I'm fine, seriously. I like being on my own."

He sighed, and the toaster pinged and she fished a plate out of the cupboard and piled the two slices of fresh toast on it. "I know you worry about me – you don't have to," she said, opening the fridge to grab the butter.

"It's my job to worry about you."

_It's also your job to raise me – and where were you for that_? She thought, slamming the fridge door shut with a little more power than was needed.

"Well take some time off worrying. What are you going to do when I go to college?"

"Go grey in the hair."

She smiled.

"I love you Bonnie," he said.

She took that as the end-of-conversation cue. "I know. I'll see you…whenever."

"Soon," he promised.

"I'll see you soon, then. Bye Dad."

"Bye honey."

She hung up, and set the phone back down. She couldn't say she was bothered by the fact that he would be away for an extended period of time, but she'd be lying if she said being alone that long would be fun. With Elena a freshly turned vampire, she was beginning to feel alienated in a town where she had never felt lonely before. _Maybe she should arrange to meet up with Caroline or Matt…_

The door bell rang, and Bonnie was pulled out of her musings abruptly.

She paused for a second, staring in the general vicinity of the front door as the bell rang again – this time with more urgency than before.

"Okay, okay, I'm coming!" she yelled at the shrill and insistent presence that stood outside her house. She exited the kitchen quickly and opened the front door.

"Bonnie Bennett?"

Bonnie's heart leapt into her throat when she saw the two cops - her mind immediately lurching to Caroline and Elena's safety.

"That's me," she said, her hand clutching onto the doorframe for support. "Is everything okay? What's happened?"

The female officer shook her head. "There's no time. We're going to have to ask you to come with us."

Bonnie folded her arms. "Who's asking?"

"Officer Ramorez and Daley," said the male cop. He was slightly taller than the woman he called Officer Daley and looked slightly younger, too. "Please, there's no time."

"Can't I at least pack some stuff?"

He shook his head. "There's no time," he repeated. "You need to come with us now."

But the urgency in his voice only made Bonnie dig her heels in further. "Okay, no. No. I'm not going anywhere with you until you _tell me what's going on_."

"Somebody's going to try to kidnap you," Officer Daley said, bluntly.

Bonnie could feel her mind become clouded with panic. Her instinct was to just follow these people out her door, but she cleared her head with an effort, attempting to think straight. "'Somebody'?" she asked. "Who? What's their name? Why do they want me?"

"This can all be explained en-route –" said the man, frustrated; glancing up and down Bonnie's street with an expression of unease.

"Tell me now, or you're not taking me anywhere!"

"'Somebody' is probably a group of people," said Officer Daley, finally snapping. "We can't tell you who they are, because we don't know either. We do know, though, that they're going to come for you."

Bonnie stared at her for a second.

Her mind scrabbled desperately to understand what was going on – whether this had any ties to Klaus, or vampires, whether Elena or Stefan knew anything about this.

"Where are you going to take me?" she asked, eventually.

"Somewhere safe. Somewhere they won't be able to find you."

She nodded slowly, and the two cops obviously took this as a sign of consent. Ramorez stood back, allowing Bonnie to step out of the house and lock up and then she took a deep breath, turning round to face them.

"This way," the woman said, softly. She was directing Bonnie towards the police cruiser parked across the street and as they walked over the road, Bonnie could feel the wind biting at her skin through the holes in her jumper. She shivered, crossing her arms as if that would contain the warmth with in her body and scanned the windows of the opposite houses, wondering if anyone was watching her, escorted by two police officers, being assured into the back of a police car. She wondered what they would think.

But there was nobody at the windows. Somehow that made her feel slightly hollow and afraid.

Ramorez and Daley clambered into the front seats and Daley started the car, peeling off the curb carefully and driving down the street to the main road.

Bonnie rooted round in her pockets for a moment quietly before realizing she hadn't taken her phone with her.

"Where are we going?" she asked; her voice quiet as she watched the houses of Mystic Falls flash by her window.

"Somewhere safe," said Ramorez, fiddling with the communication radio.

Bonnie frowned. "You've said that. But where are we going? The police station?"

If she could see a familiar face, like Caroline's mom, she knew that she'd feel better about the whole situation.

Before he could reply, the radio crackled.

_Officer's Ramorez and Daley, please come in. _

Ramorez continued to toy with the radio, but did not reply.

_Officer's Ramorez and Daley, please respond_, the voice said again.

Daley, who was driving, glanced across at her partner. "Chuck it," she advised.

He looked at her. "You reckon?"

She shrugged, indifferent, and with out blinking the man threw the radio out the car window.

Bonnie watched as it hit the grass verge they were driving past and then disappeared from sight as they tore on, speeding down the road.

Real fear diffused in Bonnie's veins now as comprehension – horrible and real – ran through her.

"Who are you?" she demanded, her voice sharp.

Daley did not seem phased. She rolled her shoulders and settled further back into the seat in front of Bonnie, flexing her hands round the wheel and relaxing. "We warned you that someone was going to kidnap you."

"Shut up," snapped Bonnie. "I could kill you."

"I'd like to see you try."

Her eyes narrowed and she focused hard on inflicting as much pain on the male officer as possible, reaching out to detect the blood vessels round his brain, focusing on severing them.

A tingling sensation of power filled her as she felt magic course through her, and her skin lifted into tiny goose pimples on her arms. But nothing happened.

"You're vampires," she said – remembering how Katherine had once been unaffected by that.

"No."

She stifled her confusion. "What do you want with me?"

"You're here to send a message. All the vampire's in this town burn."

"But I'm not a vampire."

"No, you're a witch – something we're well aware of."

Bonnie's hands balled into fists. Despite everything that had happened, she wasn't going to hurt Elena or Stefan or Damon.

She tried once again to attack Officer Ramorez, but his consciousness seemed to be almost…_slippery_ – like she couldn't get a good enough grip on it for her magic to work.

Already, adrenaline was beginning to pulse through her, making the edges of her vision swim and her mind more acute. Quickly Bonnie fastened her seat belt round herself, bracing her hands on the seat in front of her.

Ramorez turned to look at her, and his black eyes met Bonnie's green ones properly for the first time. "What are you –"

Bonnie used all of her strength and willed the steering wheel in Daley's hands to jerk to the right.

The car swerved off the road abruptly and then shuddered and flipped.

Bonnie only had time to be aware of a rush of weightlessness and then a brutal, shattering contact with the ground.


	13. The Pact

**THE PACT**

* * *

"I'm back!" Liz called as she closed the door behind her and stepped fully into her home. She took note of the clean and tidy hallway she was now in; not a product of her efforts, but probably Caroline's.

"Shocker," her daughter's voice echoed towards her. "I thought you'd taken to sleeping underneath your desk."

Liz followed the smell of freshly brewed coffee into the kitchen. At the round oak table in the center of the room sat Caroline, poring over a magazine with a steaming mug next to her right elbow.

"Well that would just be silly," said Liz, lightly. "Where would I put my mattress?"

Caroline pushed her blonde hair out of her face and turned a page. "You're hilarious," she deadpanned, not looking up. "Why are you home so early?"

"It's 6.30."

"Okay, let me re-phrase. Why are you home, _on time_?"

Liz debated explaining everything that had happened over the past few days to Caroline. Clare Kennedy, the vampire killings – all of it. But something held her back.

"I promised you I would try to keep my work life and home life separate, didn't I?" she asked, moving round the cupboards and gathering ingredients for spaghetti bolognaise.

"You did," Caroline conceded. "And you're whole attempt at domesticity is kind of freaking me out."

"Excuse me, this isn't an _attempt_; I haven't burnt the house down cooking yet, have I?"

"_Yet_," her daughter emphasized. "I don't want to leave you alone tonight now in case I mess up the feng shui and something goes wrong."

Liz paused in the act of pouring the pasta into a pan. "You're going out?" she asked, her voice catching. She turned to look at Caroline and for the first time noticed the bag on the floor next to her and the denim jacket she was wearing.

"Yeah, I'm meeting Matt and a few people at the Grill."

"Caroline…I don't think that's a good idea…"

She raised an eyebrow, hearing the seriousness in her mother's tone. "Why not?"

"I –"

The phone rang, cutting her off. Liz hurried back out into the hallway and checked the number before pulling the phone off the hook. It was the police station.

She had always made sure that her number was available at the office but lately, in favor of Caroline, she'd made it damn clear that her evenings with her daughter were sacrosanct.

"I told you not to call me at home," she said, a bite to her voice. Her eyes traveled to the kitchen to see Caroline getting up from the table. She caught her eye. _No_, she mouthed, waving for Caroline to sit down. _Stay there. _

"They got to Bonnie Bennett before we did, there's nothing we could have done."

No name was given, but Liz instantly recognized the voice of her deputy on the other end of the line.

Her blood froze to ice in her veins. "What are you saying? Is she dead?"

"No. It looks like she was kidnapped."

"Then what the hell is Lakeman for? Shouldn't he be finding her?"

"We all are, but there are some…confusing aspects."

Liz turned her back on Caroline, almost afraid that she would be able to see in her eyes that her best friend had been taken.

"Like what?"

"There's no sign of a struggle at the house."

"Are the police there?"

"Yes." He paused. "I'm sorry, Liz. You're going to have to come down."

"I know," she said, heavily. "Anything else I should know?"

"Yeah – there's been a car crash on the road going out of town. It's one of our police cars. There's no bodies at the scene but Ramorez and Daley are missing."

"Thank you."

"Do you need the Bennett address?"

"No," Liz said, heavily. "I…I've been going to that house ever since Caroline was five, I know where it is."

"Okay."

He hung up and Liz replaced the phone back on the hook and headed back to the kitchen.

Caroline was gone from the table.

Liz blinked once and cursed, striding forwards to pick up the note her daughter had left for her.

_Go and do your job. I'm going to the Grill – be back by 11._

_Love you _

_Caroline _

_xx_

The water she'd set to boil in the pan had over flowed and a puddle had collected on the floor, but Liz took no notice. She was torn between frustration, fear, and a strange sensation in her heart that was akin to the feeling she'd experienced when she'd first held her baby in her arms, seen Caroline take her first steps; a feeling only a mother can feel about her daughter.

…_love you…_

A year ago, Caroline would not have written those words. She would have snuck out the house with out telling her where she was going.

A year ago Caroline would still have been human.

Liz ignored the puddle of water that was rapidly spreading across the floor and the steaming pan and redialed the police station.

"Liz? Is there a problem?"

She stared down at the note in her hand. Fear won out over frustration. _You should have told her about the danger when you had the chance. _"Yes. Dispatch an officer to the Grill please. They need to tell my daughter and her friends to leave at once and should all stay at her friend, Matt's, for the night. Explain everything to her. Tell her that her mother has asked her to do this."

Something in the tone of her deputy's voice softened. He may not realize that Caroline was a vampire, but he understood a mother's fear for her daughter. "Sure."

"And for God's sake flash a torch in the officer's eyes before they go. It's not hard to tell if the iris is black or not."

She hung up, grabbed her jacket, fixed the kitchen and left the house, jumping into her nondescript four-by-four. The dash display illuminated into life as she started the car and the time flashed up at her in a damning glare of green. 6.38.

She'd been at home eight minutes.

* * *

Bonnie gave a low, pained moan as her body clawed its way back into consciousness.

Her head throbbed acutely and there was a horrible taste in her mouth that was simultaneously dry and acidic. When she opened her eyes, she saw an unfamiliar, dimly-lit room and a man who sat across from her. His left hand was canted lazily across the cushioned arm of his chair; a small black pistol held loosely in his grip.

Bonnie's throat tightened round whatever choked, panicked noise she would have made, and she squeezed her eyes tight shut and conjured up the moments she knew had led her to here.

_She was sitting in the back of a car that was going too fast. They were both sat in the front – her kidnappers. The woman was driving. Magic ignited in her like a lit match and she reached out with her mind and jerked the wheel in the woman's hands. The car flipped into the gutter, landing on its roof – the metal framework crumpling like a Coke can. She was knocked unconscious._

_So how did I get here? _Bonnie thought, dimly.

"I know you're awake."

Her eyes jumped open of their own accord and she saw the man looking down at her unsmilingly. Everything about him was blackness – something only enhanced by the low-lighting; black hair, black coat, black eyes, _black gun_…Bonnie's eyes darted between the weapon and his face as he spoke. When he talked, his hands talked with him and he was apt to point the gun about the room uncaringly as he illustrated whatever point he was making. More often than not, it was trained on her face. "_You_," he said, his voice gruff, "are very lucky you're a witch. A crash like that would have killed a human."

"If I wasn't a witch you wouldn't have taken me."

He smirked, tilting his head to the side. "I guess it does depend on how you look at things."

She didn't reply; only kept her gaze fixed on him carefully as she pulled herself upright, swinging her legs over the side of the sofa she'd been stretched out on.

She was surprised to see from this angle the sheer normality of the room. Bonnie wasn't sure what she had expected – a cabin out in the woods, perhaps, or a darkened basement – but not this.

A coffee table sat between herself and her abductee, stained with rings from the bottom of wet mugs and holding an old newspaper, the tv remote and a yellow post-it note stuck to the right-hand corner that read: _Dentist 2.30. _

The TV played on mute to her left, showing an old re-run of _Friends_ – she figured nobody had been bothered to turn it off – and to her right was a closed door.

It wasn't a holding cell; it was somebody's living room.

"What do you want me for?"

"We told you, we need a witch."

Bonnie jumped violently. It wasn't the man across from her that had spoken; it was somebody, who – in her brief assessment of her surroundings – she had not noticed stood behind her.

She twisted round and saw the two police officer's who had kidnapped her. It was the man who had spoken.

"_You_," Bonnie hissed. Her eyes flickered to a lamp and she hurled it across the room at him. Before it could connect with his face, however, he appeared in front of the door, and the lamp smashed uselessly into the wall at the spot he'd been standing but moments ago.

Bonnie's eyes widened.

"Enough with the magic tricks," the man with the gun snapped. Bonnie was surprised at the fact that he was talking to Officer Ramorez and not her, and even more surprised and confused at Ramorez's reply.

"What, because you can't, _Asura_?"

The muscles in the man called Asura's jaw jumped as he grit his teeth, but he remained silent.

"Because it's wasting time." Officer Daley cut in, coolly. She strode over from behind Bonnie to stand in front of Ramorez. "And it's nothing to take pride in. This is a shell of what we could be."

"And it's a hundred times what we _were_," the other man in uniform shot back. "Forgive me for reveling in it a bit."

The brown haired woman ignored him, glancing between Bonnie and Asura carefully. Bonnie froze – she'd been searching round the room for a means of escape – but the woman either didn't detect her desperation or didn't care. "You know what you have to do," she said to Asura, calmly, and led Ramorez out of the room. A few seconds later Bonnie heard another, more distant door shut and then there was silence.

The exchange between the three people left Bonnie's mind reeling. The man had _teleported_, or whatever that had been, but yet she couldn't sense any magical capabilities about him, and they needed her for _something_...

The change in status quo. That had been what had confused her the most. The man in the chair was more physically powerful than either of the two police officers – and far more intimidating – and yet the pair had spoken down to him, like he was less than they were.

"Asura," she said, finally. "That's your name."

Black eyes – and they were _black_; not dark brown, not dark grey, but black – stared into her own. Suddenly the man gave a dark laugh. "Yes and no –" he said, and with the hand that wasn't holding the gun he pulled down the collar of his coat to reveal an ugly scar that roped round the base of his neck. "_Asura _means 'slave'," he explained, tapping the scar with one finger. "This marks where my collar should be. My name is Erik."

"Erik," she repeated, disbelieving. The foreignness of the term '_asura_', the dated name of 'Erik', and his modern clothing did not seem to go hand in hand. Curiosity got the better of her, however, and instead of asking _so what do you want with me?, _she found herself blurting out: "What are you?"

"You witches called us demons."

Isolation and capture had heightened Bonnie's senses, and she picked up on the proverbial use of the past-tense quickly. "Called?"

He smiled. "Smart girl."

"I don't want your patronization. I want your answers."

"So what do you want to know?"

That threw her. She tensed, suspicious and glared at him. "You'd tell me anything? Just like that?"

"We want you to co-operate with us."

"You know you could have asked? You didn't have to kidnap me."

"Would you have helped us if we'd asked?"

She didn't reply, and Erik sighed.

He didn't seem to fit into his own body, something that was strangely jarring. He was a hulking bear of a man – with shoulders that could make a blacksmith jealous and suspicious eyes – yet his mannerisms and way of talking were surprisingly cautious and wary, as if he was the trapped deer instead of the hunting wolf. She flinched when he suddenly raised the gun.

"Hey," he said, holding his other hand out in a pointless attempt at reassurance. "I'm not going to shoot you – look. Look."

He placed the gun on the table between them, pushing it slightly until it slid to the center. "The gun wasn't a very good idea if you wanted me to help you," Bonnie told him. There was still a sour taste in her mouth and the words came out bitter; impatient.

"You're magic," Erik shrugged. "I was entitled to some kind of defense."

Her eyes were once again drawn to the ugly scar round his neck. He seemed as conscious of it as she was. Every few seconds he would adjust the collar of his coat to hide it. "Why don't you have magic?" she asked, finally. "Why can't you do what they can do?"

"_Asura _don't have magic."

"_Asura _– you keep on saying that. But you can't be a slave. Slavery was abolished…_years _ago."

"In this world."

She folded her arms. "You can't expect me to believe that."

"Why not? You're a witch, you've touched the Other Side. Surely it must have occurred to you that if there was that world, then there could be others, more –"

"- there's the world of the living and the world of the dead. Nothing more."

"Then where did we come from?"

She paused, stumped - and unwilling to admit it - and Erik leant forwards, resting his elbows casually on his knees. He observed her with a kind of quiet intensity as her brain worked through all the possible options. She considered, dimly, in the back of her mind, knocking him out and running away. As he himself had admitted, it wouldn't be hard; but something stopped her. Maybe it was her God damned curiosity, maybe a part of her just wanted to know the scope of the threat her friends were facing; but _something_, definitely, kept her stuck in that seat.

"Okay," she said, finally, as if she were talking through a philosophical theory with her college professor and not with a kidnapper. "Let's say – hypothetically – you did come here from…_another world_. One with an established hierarchy, slaves – less magic than there is in this world; why _now_? Why haven't you appeared before this?"

Erik fingered the gun lying on the table absentmindedly as he looked at her. "When you touch the Other Side, do you access them, or do they access you?" he asked, patiently, as if he really _were _her college professor.

Bonnie felt irritation spike in her veins at his answering of her question with another question, but she decided to indulge him. "I'm the one that has to access them," she admitted, slowly.

"Right. And it's the same with the link between our world and your world."

She blinked rapidly, her voice coming out disbelieving and loud. "Are you saying that a _witch intentionally _brought you through?"

He laughed. "I highly doubt it – in our mythology. It was vampires and witches who trapped us in another world in the first place."

"You mean you don't know how you came through into this world?"

He shook his head.

Bonnie chewed on her lip. He was still touching the gun, albeit in a manner that suggested he wasn't really conscious that he was doing it, but it put her on edge. "Where do I fit into this, then?" she asked, eventually.

He smirked. "Isn't it obvious? They want their power back. Before we were abolished from this world, we were the most powerful supernatural force on earth, now, finally back here, we have about the tenth of the capabilities we once had – forced to take human hosts. Demons thrive on power, witch. That's why there are slaves in our world – if you could only _see _the structure of power they have in place…but it's nothing compared to what they could have here."

"You can't expect me to help you do that."

"They didn't, really," Erik shrugged, scooping the gun up off the table and standing from his seat. He towered over her and Bonnie's head swiveled round to follow him as he walked round the sofa she was sat on to open a door she previously hadn't noticed behind her.

When he swung it open, she gasped.

It was a small, dingy kitchen – the floor a mosaic of white, mucky tiles – and strung to the ceiling, bleeding and unconscious, was Stefan.

Erik must have seen her begin to reach out for magic because he cut in quickly. "I wouldn't, if I were you…you never did ask where my two _friends_ from earlier went. One wrong move, and all your friends at the Grill will be slaughtered."

"Why?" Bonnie snapped out fiercely, trying to choke down the fear that was raging through her. She was good at bluffing, though, and her face was a mask of defiance. "You keep on saying _they_. That's what _they _planned - that's what _they _want. You keep on saying you're a slave, an _asura, _but in this world you're free! Why would you help them when they treat you like nothing?"

"I never said I was helping them," he said, a muscle in his jaw jumping. Bonnie reflexively took a step back. "They were a means to an end, but here, they're still more powerful then I am."

"Then what –"

"My family," he whispered, the words said as quietly as a prayer. Something in Erik's eyes broke for a brief moment, and Bonnie saw something that was equally all fierceness and all vulnerability. "They're still there – in the other world – and I want you to help me get them through."


End file.
